PROJECTS
The DOOR Project
How can we use art to achieve social change in our society, effecting a more just world? Let us imagine what that looks like Together with people from allover the world, refugees and migrants, people who have been denied a residence permit and people with residence permit, we explore what we can do for a more inclusive life for those of us who are without a residence permit. We are building a new space, an atelier, where together we develope, make and sell products. We work on finding new possibilities. We create, co-create, we do research, we listen to what is really needed and have developments arise. Exploring, open to the unexpected, we take direction, we listen, explore again and adjust our ways. So we can come to real needed social change. A change that gives people the possibility to become self-sufficient, getting back control over their lives, moving out of the zones where they are left to their own devices and become included in our society, in their society.
The DOOR Project is harvesting in 2022. In spring it resulted in a participatory art project Reclaim Your Space. (see below), we have been running pilots with ASKV/SteunpuntVluchtelingen doing courses in Design and Entrepreneurship and in June 2022 we launched The BAM Collective, The Borderless Amsterdam Collective, a cooperative of craftspeople offering their handmade products.
The BAM Collective
The BAM Collective is a collective of craftspeople and artists who do not have a residence permit.Through the collective the makers are able to sell their products and have the possibility to make a living in a legal way. The creation of the products we do in close collaboration with ASKV/SteunpuntVluchtelingen.
Insta: the_bam_collective
Check the website
Reclaim Your Space
Reclaim Your Space is part of The DOOR Project. In Reclaim Your Space, Barnet Kansil gives undocumented women a stage. Together they create images that depict their stories: ordinary human stories, beautiful and sad ones. Juan from Ghana tells: “The struggle of life is like the sun, very hot. Life burns hotter than the sun. For my child and me life is far better in the Netherlands, even without papers.” With this project, Barnet Kansil offers the women the opportunity to reclaim their space and show that they are human, and deserve a place like everyone else. As in her other work the images show that empty space is a place where people can be alone and lonely. But also a place of creation, where something can arise: an idea, story, direction or perspective. Reclaim Your Space is supported by the AFK (Amsterdam Fund for the Arts).
Artist Collective Ondertussen
Since 2016 Barnet Kansil has been member of artist Collective Ondertussen, a collective of artists with and without refugee background. Together the artists work on projects, create exhibitions, organize workshops and debates. Each quarter Ondertussen reacts on the exhibitons in the National Holocaust Museum (NHM) through ‘NHM verbindt’: exhibition and debate in the studio of the museum.
In 2016 she worked on ‘Imagine a Memory’. In 2017 she made the installation ‘Wtihout an Identity Card you don’t exist’ with Hussein Youssef. In 2018 Hussein Youssef and Barnet Kansil participated in the project ‘Promised Land’ and exhibited their work during museumnacht in collaboration with other members of Ondertussen and the National Holocaust Museum. In 2019 the collective changed its name to Collective Lima Limo.
The promised land
Walking on water
Hussein: “ I walk on water. I want to arrive to the perfect land that I created in my imagination. Is there something similar to that in real life? Taking my way, I do not know if I can trust on the image that I created in my mind. Repeatingly I ask myself: Can I trust? Can I reach this perfect land, or am I walking on water?”
Without an identity paper you do not exist
Together with Hussein Youssef, Barnet Kansil created an installation about his already three years lasting ‘journey without papers in Holland’. Hussein: “I passed a lot of doors. I keep finding new doors I have to pass, but I am not arriving.” They exhibited the installation in the National Holocaust Museum in reaction to the exhibition ‘Persoonsbewijzen en vervalsingen’ and organized a debate on the theme, led by writer Chris Keulemans. At museumnacht they exhibited the installation as part of a whole project by several artists of the Collective.
PS Camera
Barnet Kansil participated in the longterm project PS Camera, initiated by photographer Koos Breukel. For this project contemporary Dutch photographers made pictures with the analogue camera of renowned photographers in the history of Dutch photography. Koos Breukel worked with the camera of George Hendrik Breitner, Paul Kooiker with the camera of Gerard Fieret, Kadir van Loohuizen with the camera of Koen Wessing, Popel Coumou with the camera of Teun Hocks, and so on. Barnet Kansil worked with the camera of Jean Ruiter (1942-2005).
In 2016 the photos were exhibited in the Museum for Media Art in Hilversum.
Untitled
In this work Barnet Kansil explores the workings of memory and imagination. It is said that imagination and memory are driven by virtually the same process in the brain. Our lives consist of stories and events that do not automatically form a unity; we construct that unity ourselves. In that process both our memories and our imagination play significant roles. While we tell and arrange these stories about our lives in such ways that they help us come to terms with our complex lives. As the American sociologist Richard Sennett says: ‘The unity in a life story lies in the voice of the storyteller’.
In order to find that unity in her own biography Barnet Kansil tries to relate to the untold and hidden stories from her Indonesian family; stories she didn’t know about, but that were always somehow present. Creating and photographing installations, she engages in a process of both unravelling these stories and constructing, shaping and reshaping her own. In the end her images seem not to be about these stories themselves, but about the disturbing silence that conceales them.
On a late afternoon in august she went swimming. I wasn’t there.
This project is an inquiry into the changing meaning of places.
A place of loss can disappear into the black box of our recollection. How can we try to regain it, using our imagination, creating and recreating. Can we then change the meaning of the place and reclaim the place itself?
Out of Place
The spacial installations Barnet Kansil created and photographed for the project ‘Out of Place’ in 2011 reflect on the theme displacement. Man is shown as a supporting actor in an unreal stagesetting, as a passer-by in an empty world.
The work is inspired by the epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest story known to man, in which displacement can be found as a theme. At the same time, Out of Place relates to current events: the condition, the lives and stories of displaced immigrants at the borders of Europe. This way current and mythical reality interweave.
The empty spaces in the series are not only a metaphor for man being lost but also a ‘scene of action’: a different definition of space, a theatrical setting in which the main characters endure their fate as in ancient Greek tragedy.
In her work Barnet Kansil creates transient installations of places, locations and spaces which she photographs. In doing so, she repeatedly creates a new reality: in the installation, in the picture and possibly in the imagination of the beholder.
Her work is influenced by her studies in cultural anthropology, her personal interest in cultures and myths and by the history of her Indonesian family who in the forties had to escape from Indonesia because of war and violence.
The DOOR Project
How can we use art to achieve social change in our society, effecting a more just world? Let us imagine what that looks like Together with people from allover the world, refugees and migrants, people who have been denied a residence permit and people with residence permit, we explore what we can do for a more inclusive life for those of us who are without a residence permit. We are building a new space, an atelier, where together we develope, make and sell products. We work on finding new possibilities. We create, co-create, we do research, we listen to what is really needed and have developments arise. Exploring, open to the unexpected, we take direction, we listen, explore again and adjust our ways. So we can come to real needed social change. A change that gives people the possibility to become self-sufficient, getting back control over their lives, moving out of the zones where they are left to their own devices and become included in our society, in their society.
The DOOR Project is harvesting in 2022. In spring it resulted in a participatory art project Reclaim Your Space. (see below), we have been running pilots with ASKV/SteunpuntVluchtelingen doing courses in Design and Entrepreneurship and in June 2022 we launched The BAM Collective, The Borderless Amsterdam Collective, a cooperative of craftspeople offering their handmade products.
The BAM Collective
The BAM Collective is a collective of craftspeople and artists who do not have a residence permit.Through the collective the makers are able to sell their products and have the possibility to make a living in a legal way. The creation of the products we do in close collaboration with ASKV/SteunpuntVluchtelingen.
Insta: the_bam_collective
Check the website
Reclaim Your Space
Reclaim Your Space is part of The DOOR Project. In Reclaim Your Space, Barnet Kansil gives undocumented women a stage. Together they create images that depict their stories: ordinary human stories, beautiful and sad ones. Juan from Ghana tells: “The struggle of life is like the sun, very hot. Life burns hotter than the sun. For my child and me life is far better in the Netherlands, even without papers.” With this project, Barnet Kansil offers the women the opportunity to reclaim their space and show that they are human, and deserve a place like everyone else. As in her other work the images show that empty space is a place where people can be alone and lonely. But also a place of creation, where something can arise: an idea, story, direction or perspective. Reclaim Your Space is supported by the AFK (Amsterdam Fund for the Arts).
Artist Collective Ondertussen
Since 2016 Barnet Kansil has been member of artist Collective Ondertussen, a collective of artists with and without refugee background. Together the artists work on projects, create exhibitions, organize workshops and debates. Each quarter Ondertussen reacts on the exhibitons in the National Holocaust Museum (NHM) through ‘NHM verbindt’: exhibition and debate in the studio of the museum.
In 2016 she worked on ‘Imagine a Memory’. In 2017 she made the installation ‘Wtihout an Identity Card you don’t exist’ with Hussein Youssef. In 2018 Hussein Youssef and Barnet Kansil participated in the project ‘Promised Land’ and exhibited their work during museumnacht in collaboration with other members of Ondertussen and the National Holocaust Museum. In 2019 the collective changed its name to Collective Lima Limo.
The promised land
Walking on water
Hussein: “ I walk on water. I want to arrive to the perfect land that I created in my imagination. Is there something similar to that in real life? Taking my way, I do not know if I can trust on the image that I created in my mind. Repeatingly I ask myself: Can I trust? Can I reach this perfect land, or am I walking on water?”
Without an identity paper you do not exist
Together with Hussein Youssef, Barnet Kansil created an installation about his already three years lasting ‘journey without papers in Holland’. Hussein: “I passed a lot of doors. I keep finding new doors I have to pass, but I am not arriving.” They exhibited the installation in the National Holocaust Museum in reaction to the exhibition ‘Persoonsbewijzen en vervalsingen’ and organized a debate on the theme, led by writer Chris Keulemans. At museumnacht they exhibited the installation as part of a whole project by several artists of the Collective.
PS Camera
Barnet Kansil participated in the longterm project PS Camera, initiated by photographer Koos Breukel. For this project contemporary Dutch photographers made pictures with the analogue camera of renowned photographers in the history of Dutch photography. Koos Breukel worked with the camera of George Hendrik Breitner, Paul Kooiker with the camera of Gerard Fieret, Kadir van Loohuizen with the camera of Koen Wessing, Popel Coumou with the camera of Teun Hocks, and so on. Barnet Kansil worked with the camera of Jean Ruiter (1942-2005).
In 2016 the photos were exhibited in the Museum for Media Art in Hilversum.
Untitled
In this work Barnet Kansil explores the workings of memory and imagination. It is said that imagination and memory are driven by virtually the same process in the brain. Our lives consist of stories and events that do not automatically form a unity; we construct that unity ourselves. In that process both our memories and our imagination play significant roles. While we tell and arrange these stories about our lives in such ways that they help us come to terms with our complex lives. As the American sociologist Richard Sennett says: ‘The unity in a life story lies in the voice of the storyteller’.
In order to find that unity in her own biography Barnet Kansil tries to relate to the untold and hidden stories from her Indonesian family; stories she didn’t know about, but that were always somehow present. Creating and photographing installations, she engages in a process of both unravelling these stories and constructing, shaping and reshaping her own. In the end her images seem not to be about these stories themselves, but about the disturbing silence that conceales them.
On a late afternoon in august she went swimming. I wasn’t there.
This project is an inquiry into the changing meaning of places.
A place of loss can disappear into the black box of our recollection. How can we try to regain it, using our imagination, creating and recreating. Can we then change the meaning of the place and reclaim the place itself?
Out of Place
The spacial installations Barnet Kansil created and photographed for the project ‘Out of Place’ in 2011 reflect on the theme displacement. Man is shown as a supporting actor in an unreal stagesetting, as a passer-by in an empty world.
The work is inspired by the epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest story known to man, in which displacement can be found as a theme. At the same time, Out of Place relates to current events: the condition, the lives and stories of displaced immigrants at the borders of Europe. This way current and mythical reality interweave.
The empty spaces in the series are not only a metaphor for man being lost but also a ‘scene of action’: a different definition of space, a theatrical setting in which the main characters endure their fate as in ancient Greek tragedy.
In her work Barnet Kansil creates transient installations of places, locations and spaces which she photographs. In doing so, she repeatedly creates a new reality: in the installation, in the picture and possibly in the imagination of the beholder.
Her work is influenced by her studies in cultural anthropology, her personal interest in cultures and myths and by the history of her Indonesian family who in the forties had to escape from Indonesia because of war and violence.