In Gesprek met Iris Kensmil, Cultuurkritiek in Kunst, Theorie en Praktijk

In gesprek met Iris Kensmil, Cultuurkritiek in kunst, theorie en praktijk, Astrid Kerchman & Rosa Wevers in Transities in Kunst Cultuur en Politiek, AUP, Amsterdam, 2023

Nick Aikens: “Independent Images: Iris Kensmil’s The New Utopia Begins Here“, 2019

Thank you and what a pleasure to be invited here to speak, in front of live bodies, the first time I have done so in a very long time. And what a greater pleasure to do so at the invitation of Iris.
For the next twenty minutes I would like to spend time with, to look at – and to read – ‘The New Utopia Begins here’ with you, Iris contribution to the Dutch Pavilion in 2019 under the title Measurements of Presence’, alongside the work of Remy Jungerman and curated by Benno Tempel. This close reading will, I hope, attend to the highly sophisticated image work that Iris partakes in. It is a form of image work that not only invites us to focus on what and who we see, but equally as significant, how we see.
So – lets go into the Rietveld pavilion. Firstly I want to describe the elements of Iris’ contribution to the pavilion, which consisted of three painted installations.
As you walked into the pavilion and turned to the left a U-shaped alcove housed seven portraits of Black Utopian feminists sitting on top of an abstract composition inspired by the work of Piet Mondriaan and Kazimir Malevich.
Opposite this the work ‘Beyond the Burden of Representation’, comprised of small canvases – painted reproductions of installation photographs of exhibitions by Adrian Piper, Stanley brouwn, David Hammonds amongst others, again sitting within an abstract composition. Included also was a shelf with a number of publications by Black feminist and poret Audrey Lorde, art historians Kobena Mercer and Darby English.
The final wall, which you would encounter on the other side of the pavilion was a wall drawing of Audrey Lorde. Here, as I shall go on to look at, the portrait was applied directly on to the wall with the black rectangular forms sitting within and on top of the portrait.
So – looking at the seven portraits. These portraits show
bell hooks (b. 1952),
The Pan-Africanist Amy Ashwood Garvey (1897 – 1969),
DJ and singer Sister Nancy (b. 1962),
journalist and activist Claudia Jones (1915 – 1964),
communist and activist for Surinamese independence Hermina Huiswoud (1905 – 1998 )
anti-colonial writer and surrealist Suzanne Césaire (1916 – 1966),
and feminist science-fiction novelist Octavia E. Butler (1947 – 2006).
Two of the images are in colour, the other five are just not black and white. They sit on an abstract diagonal composition inspired by a photograph Iris saw of Piet Modriaan’s studio, taken shortly after he died, combined with an appropriated version of Kazimir Malevich’s constructivist lines.
Do we treat these images of Black utopian feminists as prompts to discuss their lives and their ideas? Or are the personalities secondary to the manner in which Kensmil depicts them and installs these portraits on the walls of the gallery: The format of the portrait itself which to some extend defines Iris’ work, the treatment of paint, of light and colour within the works; the fact that these women appear over the reworked abstract forms of Russian constructivism and de Stijl. Or do we simply consider what it means to bring these figures together within the context of the Rietveld pavilion, the spatial embodiment of Dutch modernism and the Venice biennale, the antiquated form of cultural representation based on nationhood? The power of ‘The New Utopia Begins Here’, for me, lies in their claim on the viewer to do multiple forms of aesthetic, intellectual and historic work. It asks us to pay attention to the choices Kensmil makes in who she represents as well as how she organizes and mediates them – what art historian Darby English would call ‘strategic formalism’.
In 1972 Gerhard Richter presented 48 Portraits (1971) in the neoclassical German Pavilion, built at the height of National Socialism in 1938. The portraits were of scientists, politicians and writers: Albert Einstein, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Oscar Wilde, Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka.
Looking at 48 Portraits in relation to Iris’ paintings, one recognises the framing of the portrait to include shoulders, neck and head, as well as the reduced palette and the fuzzy edges of the photorealist aesthetic. While much of the commentary on 48 Portraits selectively ignores the fact that no women or people of colour are included, instead focusing on the formal similarities between the portraits, we should not be blind to Richter’s choices.
In the same vein that Kensmil chose to paint these women in the Dutch national does not mean we should overlook the remarkable aesthetic sophistication of her paintings and installation – but it does mean we should pay due attention to the decisions she took in determining whom we encounter.
If Black feminists have been recurrent presences in Kensmil’s work, from figures such as Gloria Wekker, Philome Essed or Angela Davis, never have they been so deliberately foregrounded as in the Dutch Pavilion.
That Kensmil chose to do so within the Rietveld Pavilion, a building that comes to stand as a form of spatialized modernism, is significant. Griselda Pollock has cogently argued for understanding modernism and its early representations of women as sexualized and gendered, determined by the unequal power relations between men and women.
In her essay ‘Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity’, for example, she points to the depiction of women by male painters as being concomitant with bars (Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, 1882) and brothels (Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907). ‘We must inquire’, she says, ‘why the territory of modernism so often is a way of dealigning with masculine sexuality’, before asking straightforwardly: ‘What relation is there between sexuality, modernity and modernism?’
Kensmil’s choice to invite these Black feminists into the Rietveld Pavilion counters both the representations of women in modernist art history and offers a Black feminist approach to art history itself. An art history that, through the presence of these women and, by inference, the ideas espoused, insists on understanding practice as made up of multiple social and cultural conditions. A feminist art history that rejects the singularity, the finality of the single artwork and its male producer. The very presence of Kensmil’s Black Utopian feminists in the Rietveld Pavilion, goes further – it quietly exposes and then explodes the limitations of such outdated thinking.
Perhaps more fundamentally, the inclusion of these women under the guise of ‘The New Utopia Begins Here’ claims the forward, utopian projection of modernism through the lens of Black feminism.
The presence of Octavia E. Butler, whose science-fiction novels from the 1970s onwards can now be seen as foundational for the work of feminists Donna Haraway, Sadie Plant and others, is instructive. Kodwo Eshun, the writer, theorist and member of The Otolith Group, has argued that Butler’s science-fiction writing puts forward the argument of ‘the human or humanity as a revisable project’. In a similar vein, the inclusion of Butler, Jones et al. in the Rietveld Pavilion lays claim to modernism and modernity itself as a revisable project, driven by the presence and ideas of these women that simultaneously embrace science fiction, Pan-Africanism, poetry and music. Set against the composition in black and blue-greys of Kensmil’s wall painting, these faces emerge, re-mixed and re-vamped, as the alternative future which modernity could have had. The brilliance of Kensmil’s gesture is that she makes going back to the future possible.
Returning to Richter – he opted not to include any artists in his selection for fear that he would be perceived as being for (or against) certain artists.
On the wall facing these seven portraits Iris pays homage to the work of artists that have been formative for her work: David Hammonds, Adrian Piper, Stanley brouwn, amongst others as well as including books that have shaped her discursive and political thinking. Art historians Kobena Mercer and Darby English and Black feminist and poet Audrey Lorde …
In a wonderful text on friendship, artist Céline Condorelli suggests that the notion of friendship need not be restricted to a relationship between people, but should also encompass the ideas and politics one holds affinity with; the books we read, the theories that inspire us or the music we listen to. In this sense we can view both the people, Kensmil’s cast of characters, and the ideas they carry with them as Kensmil’s artistic, intellectual and ideological friends. Culture, Hannah Arendt eloquently stated, is ‘the company that one chooses to keep, in the present as well as in the past’.
It IS also worth considering Iris’ relationship to – and mobilizing of discourse within the installation, either through the portraits of intellectuals or the inclusion of publications in her installations. The references these figures and books speak to are highly strategic, placing her work within a wider cultural, theoretical and historical context. They constitute what art historian Griselda Pollock, following cultural theorist Raymond Williams, would call the ‘conditions of practice’ through which we might approach her work: The ideas, politics and people that produce the work. Equally, understood in this way, foregrounding the discursive is a rebuttal to modernism’s deeply held belief in the primacy of the unique art object that should be read in isolation.
Independent Images
Now I want to turn to the forms of image-work at play in Iris’ contribution to Measurements of Presence. Going past the remarkable encounter between Iris’ portraits of the Black Utopian feminists by the abstraction of Mondriaan and Malevich and the light filled spaces of the Rietveld Pavilion – I want to turn to what I think is a more fundamental, yet conceptually sophisticated proposition, that is taking place at the level of the image.
In an interview with Willem de Rooij in the publication for the pavilion Kensmil comments on the relationship between her meticulously constructed paintings and the photographs that are her source material: ‘They need to become independent images’, she says before concluding succinctly: ‘A painting is not a photograph and you can play with those differences’.
Let’s look again at the grouping of seven portraits.
In Iris’ interview with de Rooij she comments on the decision to paint two of the women in full colour.
The choice to depict all but two of the women in almost black and white does not reflect the fact that they were alive before colour photography came into wide circulation.
Rather, Kensmil chose to paint Hermina Huiswoud and in colour to make us aware of the type of images we were looking at, to reference different forms of image reproduction and draw our attention to them as constructed – whereby we acknowledge that it was her choices determined the manner in which we saw them.
Kensmil’s relationship to photography is fascinating. Her use of thinly applied luminous undercoats, which give her subjects such vitality and presence, is a technique first used by the Impressionists such as Manet or Degas – important reference points for Kensmil or, as Pollock draws our attention to, the pioneering work of Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot. This exploration of the qualities of paint was happening at a time when painters were grappling with the implications of the invention of photography for their medium. A grappling that would have profound ramifications for the canon of painting through post-impressionism, cubism and of course the geometric abstraction of the constructivists in Russia and de Stijl in the Netherlands.
In this U-shaped gallery, not only do we have an encounter that asks us to re-imagine modernity – via the sampled forms of Malevich and Mondriaan serving as a backdrop to the faces and lives of these future-oriented Black women. Kensmil also lays out in front of us different forms of image making, that take us back through the introduction of photography, and painting’s response to the ‘age of mechanical reproduction’ – both in the form of impressionism’s techniques, as well as the resulting abstraction. She invites different genealogies of images to share space. What is significant of course is that she does this via the images of these women – who have strived in different ways to be foregrounded: either through independence struggles, as Black feminists or through creative work. Women who would not have been known to the vast majority of visitors to the Rietveld pavilion, in contrast to the all too familiar lines and forms of avant-garde abstraction. Kensmil mobilises the formal, material qualities of painting in a highly subjective, constructed process.
Turning to the background. The composition, as I mentioned previously is inspired by a photograph of Mondrian’s studio and composition of Malevich.
Behind these portraits she brings these two together in grey scale as if a DJ would blending two tracks. Iris sampling Mondrian and Malevich on her terms.
In a filmed interview Iris comments on the fact that the seeming geometric composition is, at certain moments unsettled. Right angles, appear subtly off kilter, giving what Kensmil calls its cadence, the composition’s humming dancing vitality. Indeed, standing in the pavilion you could imagine the diagonals and T-shapes sliding past one another, reconfiguring as the portraits of these seven portraits women stay rooted to their spot.
On the wall facing these seven portraits was the work ‘Beyond the Burden of Representation’, consisting of a series of smaller canvases and two wall mounted shelves on which stood a number of publications. The wall can be read as a homage of sorts to artists who have been formative for Iris: stanley brown, Adrian Piper, On Kawara, David Hammonds, Charlotte Posenenske. The miniature canvases are painted reproductions of installation photographs from different exhibitions:
Adrian Piper at MoMA, stanley brown at the Van Abbemuseum. Kensmil’s painted archive of her own art historical canon, the company she chooses to keep ….
Next to them are a selection of books: Audrey Lorde, Kobena Mercer, English’s How to see a work of art in total darkness – writers who have been formative for Kensmil. A second vitrine houses a catalogue of brouwn. The two shelf-vitrines and the small canvases sit on top of a continuation of the Malevich/ Mondriaan composition. The size of the miniatures and the shelves, and the fact that they appear in the same grayscale as the wall drawing means they too become components within the abstract composition, merging with, or dancing amongst the rectangles and flecks of Malevich and Mondriaan, the viewer tasked with discerning what sits within the frame of the canvas and what sits on the wall, what are abstract shapes and what are representations, what images we think we know and what images we need to work to discover.
Kensmil’s exploration of different forms of image making continues with the vast wall drawing of Audrey Lorde. Whereas with the series of seven portraits of the Black Utopian Feminists or the miniatured archive, Kensmil overlaid the canvases or the on to the sliding lines of Malevich and Mondriaan, here she works directly on the wall. The relationship between ‘background’ composition and foregrounded image is inverted. And whereas the painted books of On Kawara echoed the Modriaan-esque geometric blocks so that photograph, painted reproduction, and abstraction became interchangeable, here Lourde’s image applied directly on to the wall of the pavilion rather than contained within a canvas – her image the ground from which Mondriaan’s lines flicker in the foreground.
So here, we have a sense across this three sets of images of foreground and background
changing places, the cast of characters and references in the pavilion being reconfigured.
The wall drawing is also taken form a photograph, yet now the black rectangles that appear on top of the image seem as if the flickering of a television set, or the pixels of LCD screen. It’s not hard to imagine them dancing across the wall before vanishing – leaving Lorde’s image un-interrupted and crystal clear. My reading of this image in relation to TV imaging is speculative – but it’s a reading that is symptomatic of the type of image-work Iris undertakes and in turn invites us to do. We are taken through a topology of paintings’ relationship to mechanically reproduced images and the archive itself. However, in presenting these women, artists and writers within this topology she calls on us to question not only what and who sits in our respective foregrounds and backgrounds – but how we come to see them: forms of representation, abstraction, and the fiction of art history, Kensmil tells us are all constructed. Re-tune your eyes, she seems to say, and a different set of images, a different set of histories, can come into focus.
I want to end by considering an image that is not in the pavilion. The painting is titled ‘Archiving a Future History’ from 2017. It shows Jessica de Abreu, co-founder of the Black Archives in Amsterdam (which opened in 2016) and a collaborator of Iris’, holding two photographs. The photographs are of Suriname-born political activist and first Black member of the communist movement Otto Huiswoud and his wife Hermine Huiswoud, who Kensmil would go on to paint for the Dutch pavilion. De Abreu collaborated with Iris on the Dutch pavilion – they decided together on the women that would be represented there, whilst Jessica researched their lives and works, writing entries for each of them in the book. This painting, is also testament to the their collaboration and the manner in which their work facilitates and speaks to one another’s: the images that Jessica’s archiving engenders and visa versa – how Iris’s images bring the archive into being, both as images and through the research that takes place around them.
In this painting Jessica is wearing white gloves and is standing in the centre for research into Black culture in Harlem, New York. The top photograph shows Otto and Hermine at a reception in Cuba, given in their honour after they were re-united following the end of world war two. The bottom image shows Huiswoud at his piano.
Let’s consider what we see here: A painted image, based on a photograph, showing an archivist – the co-founder of the first archive dedicated to Black perspectives in the Netherlands – holding two photographs of the first Black communist and his wife, drawn from an archive of the history of Black struggle. What future history is being called upon in the title – the one that people unfamiliar with the life and politics of Otto Huiswoud will come to know? The history Jessica and the Black Archives will form in their work in the Netherlands? Or the painting itself – as archive, as independent image? This painting draws together Kensmil’s sophisticated image-work where different forms of representation – photographic, painterly, archival and of course political – sit within carefully applied paint. Yet for all its references and evocations, the painting remains an independent image.
Nick Aikens, lecture at De Balie, september 2021

Iris Kensmil, Some of My Souls, at Melly by Sofia Hernandez Chong Cuy

For nearly two decades, Iris Kensmil’s artistic practice has been committed to positioning the experience, activism, and intellectual work of Black people. This she initially addressed by pictorially capturing scenes of communal gatherings, whether convenings on dance floors or at political demonstrations. Expressing shared community values as much as struggles. They manifest what the scholar Paul Gilroy identifies as an “embattled cultural sensibility, which has also operated as a political and philosophical resource.”
Over the years, Kensmil’s work has increasingly focused on portraiture. Her figures are depicted with paint or charcoal on small and large canvases or paper, or in art installations involving murals and vitrine displays. Her portraits portray a range of figures, from influential Black thinkers and musicians of the twentieth century, to young women carrying out emancipatory work in the present. Stylistically, she has sought ways to break with how Black people, and especially women, have been depicted—commodified, subjected, or imperilled. Instead, Kensmil aims to picture them “as the intellectuals they are.”
Raised in Suriname during her early childhood. Kensmil was born in Amsterdam, where she currently lives and works. Her newest paintings portray key figures in the Netherlands, gives them a voice, makes them heard, mobilizing. This new work follows Kensmil’s Six Woman (Understanding Futurity) and The New Utopia Begins Here. These two art installations from 2019 include portraits of women whose work had these aims, here or abroad, paving the road for creating, imagining and working towards a better present-day and future, both for Black people as much as society at large.

Gazing into the Blues: Hope and the Archaeology of Black Memory in the Work of Iris Kensmil, Wayne Modest

Published in Exhibition Catalogue: Blues Before Sunrise, Bergen NL 2019

I
Half visible, guitar in hand, the sitter’s fingers hover above the strings, at the ready to play the next chord. We are left to wonder if he provides the soundtrack for this solo exhibition Blues Before Sunrise. D minor, G minor, D minor, A minor… his melancholic poise leads us in to this 1930s hit:
I have the blues before sunrise,
Tears standing in my eyes.
I have the blues before sunrise,
Tears standing in my eyes.
It was a miserable feeling, now babe,
A feeling I do despise.
His is a focussed, even piercing gaze, as he stares out of the canvas. Does he look at us? We cannot be sure. Perhaps it is even arrogant to imagine that it is us who command his attention, his gaze more likely attuned to the musical worlds that his song creates. Our sitter gazes into the Blues…
The sitter’s posture, coupled with this exhibition’s title, may have prompted us, prompted me in any case, to think that he provides this exhibition’s musical accompaniment. But the title of the work itself, The Motor City is Burning, leads us in another direction. It leads us to John Lee Hooker’s [the sitter here imaged] Blues hit that recalls 1967 Detroit, a city on fire, due to riots in response to police violence.
II
The Motor City is Burning and Blues Before Sunrise, are not Iris Kensmil’s first engagements with the Blues. In fact, they form part of her ongoing concerns, a continuation of a work already started some time ago. Other works in her oeuvre of sonic visuality include We the People Who Are Darker Than Blue, which she describes as:
The title is from a song by Curtis Mayfield, which reveals my love for the vinyl-records of Black musicians. Blues, Soul and Reggae are entertainment but the testimony of Black experience can be heard there as well. At home, my father was passionate about Soul and Reggae music. I want to place this music in the historical canon. Every singer in We the People Who Are Darker Than Blue has done some kind of protest song.
Indeed, Blues, Soul, Reggae are the popular projects of history writing of the Black diaspora. Some may resist the claim, but they are Black music, sonic responses to Black subjugation; the archives of Black Atlantic imagination.
It is this concern with remembering, or re-membering, and especially remembering the Black experience that underpins Kensmil’s ongoing work. Hers is a project in what Jamaican scholar David Scott described as an ‘archaeology of Black memory’. Such a practice of excavation was, for Scott, and indeed for me, an invitation to think about certain archives, especially those archives associated with Black lives, their contents and practice, differently as practices of counter memory.
Scott describes this counter memory as ‘the moral idiom and semiotic registers of remembering against the grain of the history of New World Black deracination, subjection and exclusion’. In thinking about this archaeology of Black memory in relation to criticism, Scott writes:
One way of approaching criticism is to think of it as a dimension of a community’s mode of remembering, an exercise, literally and metaphorically, of re-membering, of putting back together aspects of our common life so as to make visible what has been obscured, what has been excluded, what has been forgotten.
Kensmil’s work, the terrain in which she labours, forms part of such work of criticism. Whether it is her engagement with the Blues, or with the Black emancipatory struggles across the world, or whether it is in the accounting for the lives of Black feminists whose radical poetics and politics were necessary to making the promise of Feminism open for more than a restricted (White) few, Kensmil participates in a mode of community remembering, of remembering community, that resists dominant attempts to forget certain histories. And within the context of the Netherlands, from where she works, such a project takes on increased urgency.
It is no secret that despite long traditions of anti-colonial struggles, of Black radical intellectual practice, of queer and feminist mobilisation by people of colour, there remains a stubborn ignorance by mainstream, canonical scholarly and archival practices in the Netherlands to these traditions. Similarly, we are well aware that art produced by artists of colour, by women artists, languishes at the edges of the artistic canon. The recent emergence of institutions like The Black Archives, where Kensmil has also shown her work, or earlier archives such as Flamboyant of the 1980s, has challenged such normative forgetfulness. In her work Kensmil demands that we remember the work of the Surinamese Dutch anti-colonial hero Anton de Kom, or that of the literary artist Astrid Roemer.
Kensmil reminds us how little remains in our imaginary, in our cultural archives, of those nurses from Suriname that were invited to the Netherlands in the 1950s and 60s to fill the shortage in medical personnel. She reminds us that, like the recent Windrush affair in Britain, to forget these nurses, to forget De Kom, is to forget colonialism, and the entangled relationship between the colonial past and the current make-up of the plural policies, our multicultural societies, that constitute present-day Europe. What I see in Kensmil’s work is that to forget, is to disavow the relationship between colonialism, migration and citizenship in Europe today, which often results in us seeing Europeanness and Blackness as incommensurable.
III
In engaging with Kensmil’s work, we are led to question the paradoxical space that Blackness, that Black lives occupy within Dutch, indeed within European social imaginary. Within the current mood of decolonisation, Blackness, like other forms of identification, including gendered and sexual identification deemed non-normative, have become touchstones for discussions around diversity and inclusion. If Black lives, like those ‘Others’ colonised by Europe, were ignored in the past, then today they have become fashionable. This is true also of museums, where institutions are not only addressing the gaps in their collections, through the acquisition of the works of self-identified artists of colour or queer artists, they are also announcing these acquisitions at lightning speed and within the widest media. Working myself in a museum I am complicit in this fashionable diversity work.
Yet the lightning speed of this change cannot go unremarked, its genuineness cannot go unquestioned. Are we sincere in our attempts at change, or is this part of the symbolic politics that has come to be common in the work of diversity? Is this a change, or simply what I have called otherwise practices of pragmatic governance – giving those who protest just enough to give them the illusion of listening. We would have to admit that this is a common strategy for governing quiescence.
Still, we cannot deny the potentiality, the promise, that such changes may hold. We also need, however, to acknowledge those who have already been involved in this arduous work of reimagining canons; of thinking inclusion, of re-membering worlds left forgotten. We have to acknowledge the work of the archaeologists, who, like Kensmil have participated ‘in the construction of what might be called an institution of memory and an idiom of remembering’.
IV
Kensmil’s archaeology, her practice of remembering, while sonic in its interest, is a project in visuality. Like Kensmil herself, several commentators have framed her work as a practice in the visual life of Black modernity. This is for sure true, and the importance of such a project cannot be underestimated. I am at the same time cautious about those attempts that simply place Kensmil – like other Black artists – within any already existing canon; that somehow try to recover her for an already recognised genre. On such account, Kensmil’s work becomes readable, acceptable, (only) as it fits, even if as a challenge, within the already comfortable periodization of western art.
We should see her work here as also an attempt to recover modernity’s raced formations, its occlusions, its aphasia, its violence. For this, we should take our cue from those de-colonial scholars whose demand is that we see modernity and coloniality through a joined-up analytical lens, or from the cue of scholars like Paul Gilroy for whom slavery and colonialism were foundational to the modern project, including its counter-cultures.
Through her commitment to portraiture, Iris Kensmil invites us to gaze into the Blues. Like the Blues, like Reggae, or like Soul, this is an invitation not just to address erasure and subjugation, but also to think through the role of the sonic, of the visual, in re-membering the love, joy and hopes that Black people fashioned as part of the counter culture of colonial modernity.

A conversation between Iris Kensmil and Willem de Rooij

Amsterdam, Saturday 2 February 2019
Published in : The measurement of Presence, the catalogue of Dutch Pavilion at Biennale Venice 2019

Willem de Rooij
You just showed me the design for a wall painting, a mural inspired by the work of Mondrian and Malevich. Covering several of the interior surfaces of the Rietveld Pavilion, this wall painting forms the basis of your installation.
Iris Kensmil
My initial starting point was a photograph of Mondrian’s final studio in New York. In the middle of the room you can see Victory Boogie Woogie, prominently displayed on a painter’s easel. Different geometrical forms have been arranged on the wall. I was inspired by Mondrian for the feeling of space and light in his oeuvre, but also by the way he organized and approached his work in the studio. Photographs of his workspace suggest that Mondrian thought about surfaces and their position on the canvas by first placing them on the wall, by gradually trying things out with colour and form.
Willem de Rooij
Can you identify with this kind of systematic approach? Is this how you would like to work?
Iris Kensmil
I work differently to Mondrian but I admire his methodology. Abstraction also plays a role in my installations, especially in the combination of abstract murals, on the one hand, and figurative paintings or drawings, on the other. With these abstract forms, I accentuate the space that the viewer enters. The work becomes part of the architecture, in this case the Rietveld Pavilion. Here I’m thinking about the utopian ideas that Mondrian and Malevich formulated about space.
Willem de Rooij
From your sketches, we can see that the wall painting is deployed in different ways. There is a full-blown portrait of Audre Lorde on one wall, while abstract forms borrowed from Mondrian and Malevich cover the others. Painted portraits of Black women have been hung on top of the mural: philosophers, writers and activists, all with links to the Caribbean. It feels as though you are constructing a collage by shifting surfaces and shapes, just as Mondrian might have done.
Iris Kensmil
Yes, indeed, it’s a question of how to harmonize abstraction and figuration.
Willem de Rooij
On the third wall, you show paintings that refer to the work of artists you find important.
Iris Kensmil
They aren’t portraits but painted images of exhibitions by stanley brouwn, On Kawara, David Hammons, Charlotte Posenenske and Adrian Piper. It’s something of an homage. I look at the artworks made by these artists, but also at the way these artists chose to exhibit their works. stanley brouwn has always fascinated me because of how he strived to safeguard the authenticity and specificity of his work, and how he aimed to retain control over the perception and interpretation of his oeuvre.
Willem de Rooij
This part of your installation seems primarily concerned with what happens to an artwork once it leaves the studio, its reception and distribution, and how artists can create limits in this dynamic.
Iris Kensmil
Exactly. My paintings and installations are usually about a certain perception of the world. It’s very personal. But if you’re from elsewhere, when you’re both Black and female, then it doesn’t take long for the work to be pigeonholed. As a result, it is usually approached politically, or seen from the perspective of slavery. It is never understood as merely art, as something that can be appreciated without any kind of external context.
Willem de Rooij
The artists you reference are all conceptual artists. Within this context, I’m reminded of Édouard Glissant’s notion of opacité: these artists were united by their refusal to conform to the typical conventions and expectations of the art market. Do you see it in those terms?
Iris Kensmil
I recognize that these artists claimed the right not to be reduced to the known, but they also developed constructive models as a way to survive, to think ahead. Just like the women in my paintings were all philosophers and writers who envisaged a better future.
Willem de Rooij
The installation unites the three main pillars of your life and work: being Black, being a woman, and being an artist. You’ve long created images of Black people, often women, who you believe to be missing from the canon. The seven women you depict here were builders: they wanted to kick-start progress, just like you.
Iris Kensmil
There are many people for whom there are no recognizable images in museums, no representations of their work, their predecessors, their culture. For as long as this identification is lacking, they will find it hard to take pleasure in how artworks are made. When I look at images of White people, I don’t just enjoy thinking about why they were made, but especially about how. Yet even for someone like me, there are vast areas of lived experience and history that are missing from museums.
Willem de Rooij
The philosophers, makers and activists you portray are linked to one another via ideas or attitude. You depict them by means of vague lines, whereas the wall painting that serves as a background, with the abstract forms inspired by Mondrian and Malevich, has been executed with clear lines. On the one hand, you connect these two worlds, both of which are characterized by progressive, utopian thinking and formal innovation. But on the other hand you also differentiate them by using two contrasting visual languages.
Iris Kensmil
The stylistic differences mean that either world becomes recognizable as its own sphere, but the two worlds also converge. A utopia is future-oriented: a new world in which things are done differently. In that spirit, I want these two seemingly contradictory styles to enter into a dialogue with each other.
Willem de Rooij
In preparation for this conversation you mentioned a number of painters who are important to you: Francisco Goya, Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas, Gerhard Richter and Barbara Kruger. Apart from Kruger, who, like you, makes wall-based works, they all work with oil on canvas. Furthermore, they rarely use clear lines in their work. With Richter, the images seem to be out of focus, the lines are vague and read like a spectrum. They are often, not a line as such, but an area.
Iris Kensmil
There is a line, but it is not sharply defined, because I think this would emphasize the constructed nature of the depiction.
Willem de Rooij
With Goya, this vagueness is associated with the subjective, the psychological, as in the ‘Black Paintings’. In his portraits of the royal family we understand this subjectivity as criticism, a criticism not just established through the appearance of the depicted figures, but also via the painting technique. Would you agree?
Iris Kensmil
Absolutely. There are different periods in Goya’s oeuvre, and it is fascinating to look at his evolution as a painter. The young Goya accentuated the space by separating the blurry areas from sharply defined parts. His later ‘hallucinatory’ works are almost exclusively blurred. Interestingly enough, these blurred paintings seem ‘more real’, even though we know they are depictions of dreams and fantasies.
When I first saw Goya’s work in the Prado in Madrid, I was astonished by the grandeur of his paintings and the scale of the royal personages. They are reflections on the political situation in Spain at the time. Some images seemed to vibrate with colours shining through from the deepest layers of the painting, while in other rooms the black period was central: works that are very heavy and bombastic in form, colour and contrast. I was completely fascinated by the reverberation of black in his work. On the other hand, those clearly defined but tender family portraits have tremendous presence.
Willem de Rooij
Other than Goya, who died in 1828, the painters you mention were all active during the photographic era. For impressionists such as Degas and Manet, the camera played a key role in their work. Is your fascination with these artists also due to their creative engagement with photography?
Iris Kensmil
When I see a work by Degas, I never think of photography: I find his spaces to be clearly painterly. He creates space with colour. With Manet, I’m intrigued by how he assembles visual elements on a canvas, and how he emphasizes the resulting construction with colour accents.
For my portraits for the Rietveld Pavilion, I used photographic material from my extensive image archive. Selecting which photographs to use and deciding how to frame the selected photographs were critical tasks. I think that photography – unless done exceptionally well – often establishes a certain distance; the photographer’s dedication to the subject is less perceptible. Because painting is a much slower process, it is in my opinion easier to recognize the painter’s commitment.
Willem de Rooij
Do you yourself take photographs?

Iris Kensmil
Definitely. Photography is essentially about speed. You can capture a fleeting moment in a mere instant. Painting is completely different as it’s a much slower process. Photography has mainly taught me about framing, about how to determine the edges of the image. I have also used my own photographs as the starting points for paintings. These were freely constructed images of very precisely lit models in self-made decors. I worked on these together with a film-maker.

Willem de Rooij
Have you ever exhibited these photographs?
Iris Kensmil
No, not yet. I work with different kinds of sources. There are the colleagues who inspire me formally and technically or more in terms of content and attitude. The latter include David Hammons, stanley brouwn and Barbara Kruger. Then there are the written sources, which I have shown in installations like Study in Black Modernity (Van Abbemuseum, 2017). And then there are the photographs that I take or collect for my own use. This material alone has a great deal of potential. Just organizing it could be very inspiring. I attempted it in the past, but I always got sidetracked because I came across images that made me start a new painting.
Willem de Rooij
Why would you make a painting of a photograph when you could just show the original image? Is it because you simply love to paint, or because something happens during the process that you think it is important to show? Or is it both?
Iris Kensmil
It is very much about the process of painting. You have to make so many decisions because you can produce a myriad of subtle nuances. In this slow process of making choices, the purpose of the painting becomes very clear during the act of its making. Spaces are created that you zoom in on, as it were. This is what fascinates me about painting.
Willem de Rooij
To take a concrete example, the photograph that led to the portrait of Amy Ashwood Garvey. When was this taken?
Iris Kensmil
Amy Ashwood Garvey was born in 1897 and died in 1969. The photograph probably dates from the early 1920s.
Willem de Rooij
If you compare the painting and the photograph of Amy Ashwood Garvey, you do indeed see two very different images. You say, this is due to the act of painting, whereby spaces are created that you can zoom in on. Do these spaces have a concrete location on the canvas? Or are they more abstract, mental spaces?
Iris Kensmil
The spaces that I’m talking about are more mental, but in the process of painting they materialize. So they are both. Taking a photograph is almost instantaneous. Perhaps the slowness of painting, the cadence of building something up in thin layers of paint returns something from the original moment, from the relationship to the model and her context.
If I had taken this picture myself, I would have become part of the decisions, of the situation, and of how the model behaved. If you experience something like that yourself, then you carry it with you into the painting process that follows. Afterwards, this can be seen in the physical painting.
Willem de Rooij
Amy Ashwood Garvey’s photograph complies with all the conventions of portrait photography: the classic lighting, the background that is devoid of references. You have said that the distance that you experience within the photograph disappears by painting it. Is the distance in the photograph the result of the compositional conventions or of its material qualities?
Iris Kensmil
In addition to the compositional conventions that were followed, it would seem that Amy is the subject of a very detached gaze; this was obviously not a photographer who could establish a relationship with the model beyond his technical skills.
I cropped the image, which works like zooming in. This makes it seem as though we are closer to her, and the distance is reduced in a very literal way. I also made the image more ‘open’ during the painting process, and more transparent than the original photograph, which is studio-lit. But above all, I made Amy less ‘innocent’ because I wanted to emphasize her self-confidence. Someone described her expression as ‘strong but sad’.
In the portrait of Hermina Huiswoud, the different layers of colour are still clearly visible. The portrait of Amy Ashwood Garvey is subtler in hue and built up in shades of grey, brown and blue.
Willem de Rooij
Her face becomes very animated because of the beautiful brown tones under that grey light. And I see red and pink. A very warm kind of brown, which also seems a bit yellowish.
Iris Kensmil
Yes, I like to call it a warm light.
Willem de Rooij
In this case, the source is a black-and-white picture – at the time they often had a sepia tone. On closer inspection, black and white are always intensely complicated colours in your paintings.
Iris Kensmil
That’s true. I never actually use black. I always produce gradations of grey with blue or brownish tones. Nor do I use white paint. I rather opt for pale grey or paint that I have thinned. When the white is less pure, it has a greater sense of vibration.
Willem de Rooij
So colour always has to be mixed first?
Iris Kensmil
Sometimes it comes directly from the tube, but how you then apply it makes a world of difference. Do you apply it immediately and just leave it alone? Do you blur it? Or do you partially remove the paint and apply another layer on top?
Willem de Rooij
You apply the oil paint in thin layers. Why is that?
Iris Kensmil
I paint very thinly because I want the lighter-coloured layers below to shine through. This makes the experience more ‘real’. If you work with highlights (which are applied to the uppermost paint layer), it’ll still look like paint, making the work look more like a picture. It took me a long time to develop this style. When I first started painting, I used an impasto technique and made rather rough works. It takes time to master the material, but above all to refine your concept of visuality and to develop the right style. There are so many different ways to paint! At some point, you have to decide what you want your work to look like. It’s a question of daily practice and discovery, and of looking at the work of other painters. When I worked with thick layers of paint, I always felt that this is not really me. Finding the right direction was an intuitive process. And by the way, I’m still searching … There are more works to be made!
Willem de Rooij
Because you paint so thinly, your works remain close to the materiality of the images that form the starting points.
Iris Kensmil
I don’t want the painting to be about the gesture of painting. With the Rietveld Pavilion constellation in particular, it is important for me to advance modernity, not the self-centredness of modernism. If I painted in an impasto style, the emphasis would be on the physical. I think that my way of representing light by working with thin layers brings out the intellectual aspect in these women, and that’s very important to me.
Willem de Rooij
Almost all the portraits of women in the series are based on black-and-white photographs, but two portraits, those of Sister Nancy and Hermina Huiswoud, are in full colour. How did you arrive at that decision in relation to the overall group?
Iris Kensmil
I wanted to play with the way in which we often randomly think that images belong to a particular time. bell hooks lives and works in the present, but her portrait is in black and white. Hermina Huiswoud is depicted in full colour, even though she died long ago. All these women have contemporary relevance – their work is still pertinent to younger generations.
Willem de Rooij
On a personal level, are there any moments or areas of dissatisfaction in the work?
Iris Kensmil
Sometimes big, sometimes small. And sometimes you can be satisfied! Most of the time, I keep working until I think nothing more can be done, even if I’m not totally satisfied with every detail. Then the image hangs, as it were, on a border where it still fascinates and where it raises questions. If you go beyond this boundary as a maker, then you might as well throw the work away.
Willem de Rooij
Is that dissatisfaction easier to live with the longer you do this work?
Iris Kensmil
Yes, it’s something that I have more and more of a grip on. In all probability, you’re still developing ways to get around the sense of frustration. I am sure that this also applies to other media.
Willem de Rooij
We’ve talked about painting in thin layers. This sometimes creates images that could be described as somewhat vague in certain areas. Furthermore, the lines are not always clear and are deliberately out of focus. You yourself have described it as ‘blurred’.
Iris Kensmil
Strangely enough, if you blur the line, the image often seems more realistic than when you leave it alone.
Willem de Rooij
Despite their better judgement, people still seem to find that photography comes closest to observable reality. Are you striving, instead, for images that don’t truly mimic reality?
Iris Kensmil
They need to become independent images. A painting is not the same as a photograph, and you can play with those differences.
Willem de Rooij
Gerhard Richter started his career during the Pop Art era, at a time when artists were focusing on objects and images from their daily lives. He developed techniques that allowed him to create a kind of blurred impression of the photographs he repainted. Is this blurring technique one of the things that interest you in Richter’s work?
Iris Kensmil
The funny thing is that I didn’t initially notice the vagueness … Only when I read more about it and actually saw his works did it become apparent. I find it absolutely fascinating that we seem to get closer to reality because of this blurring. In the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, I realized that his works have an immense physical impact, whereas they look much more like the original photographs when reproduced in a book.
I also like how Richter reveals hidden layers of meaning in seemingly mundane objects. Record Player (1988), for example, is an everyday image with a charged story: the revolver with which Andreas Baader killed himself in the Stammheim prison in Stuttgart was hidden inside this very turntable. The original photograph was taken by the police as part of a forensic investigation. Because Richter framed the image in a certain way, it will always be visually exciting.
Willem de Rooij
Do your paintings depict people or images?
Iris Kensmil
I have never met any of these people, so for me they are images. But they are also historical figures, and because they are Black women, I want to emphasize the fact that they are not victims, but dignified intellectuals, since the word ‘intellectual’ is not typically associated with Black people. It may be sensitive to say of Black people, they are images. But in the detachment that such an image generates, the space for me to think is created.

Iris Kensmil: Conditions of Practice and the Reimagining of Modernity, Nick Aikens

Published in : The measurement of Presence, the catalogue of Dutch Pavilion at Biennale Venice 2019
Nick Aikens, February 2019

For three months I walked past Iris Kensmil’s 23-metre wall installation Study in Black Modernity (2017) almost every day. The work – comprising a large printed wallpaper on which hung charcoal and ink drawings and a mounted vitrine of books – was installed on a long stretch of corridor outside the Van Abbemuseum auditorium that led visitors to and from the museum’s galleries.. Each time I passed, a different image lodged in my mind: the arresting, three-metre-high drawing of two African-American women, one with their mouth covered to protect them from inhaling fumes, next to a gasmasked policeman. The image, I later learnt, was taken from a photo of the Black Lives Matter protest in Charlotte in 2016: a Black man was shot by the police during the protest, which itself had been organized to demonstrate against the earlier killing of a Black man by the police. From the opposite direction I would stare at a woman reading from a sheet of paper in what looked like a study or a studio. I wondered whether she was reading the text that appeared next to her, enlarged as part of the wallpaper, an interview between the writer Anil Ramdas and cultural theorist Stuart Hall. The interview appeared in Mijn Vader Huis (1993), one of the few books published in the 1990s in Dutch – and from a Dutch perspective – that examined the interlocking questions surrounding national, racial and ethnic identities. The words of Angela Davis, the iconic Black feminist, who was the subject of Kensmil’s remarkable portrait Angela #2 (2015), were enlarged at the other end of the walkway – Davis, who once so eloquently asked that we ‘find the words we do not have’. Stopping to look at the constellation of smaller drawings in the centre of the installation I would discover among them images of Nelson Mandela, a portrait of the American writer and civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois, the acquittal of Davis, portraits of sociologists Philomena Essed and Gloria Wekker, images from a protest against the racist Zwarte Piet ‘tradition’ in the Netherlands, and the Dutch rapper Akwasi. The lines between the different histories and realities of Black counterculture, oppression and emancipation constantly being reconfigured. Modernity retold. Modernity rethought. Looking into the vitrine of books, an inspiring, generative bibliography presented itself, spanning art history, Black studies, feminism and Dutch racism: James Baldwin, Paul Gilroy, Darby English, Essed, Wekker, Ramdas and so many more. If these books were not familiar to me or the visitors to this modern museum, itself complicit in aiding the study of a very white modernity, the implication was clear. Go and read, they said. Do the work. Study.
This essay will consider different elements of Iris Kensmil’s practice. I use the word practice in affinity with feminist art historian Griselda Pollock and cultural theorist Raymond Williams, who ask that we consider the conditions of practice in concert with artworks, rather than allow readings to begin and end with singular objects or images. For Kensmil, as Study in Black Modernity and her practice at large attest, the conditions – of painting, of reading, of listening, of archiving – work polyphonically and they need to be read as such. Much like the precise way Kensmil builds up layers of paint in her paintings, we must slowly and deliberately try to formulate a reading of the different elements of her practice that attends to its formal choices and qualities, to the relationship it sets up between image, archive and discourse, to the genre of portrait painting, to modernity itself, and crucially to the politics and emotion through which it emerges.

Portraits of Modernism
Kensmil developed Study in Black Modernity shortly after her solo exhibition at Club Solo in Breda, where a selection of works from 2012–15 was shown, predominantly the portraits which constitute the central thrust of her practice. The subjects of the portraits bear testament to Kensmil’s ongoing project over the past decade to honour figures from the fields of art, music, politics and academia – across generations and continents – dedicated to different forms of Black emancipatory struggle, and in doing so to consider their relevance today. To cite a few examples shown at Club Solo, we could look to Voices Across the Ocean (2015), which included Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican-born journalist and activist, father of Pan-Africanism (Here the New Negro Begins, 2015), and Angela Davis (Angel Davis #2, 2015) or to the iconic musician James Brown depicted lying in a open casket in James Brown Is Dead #2 (2014–15). Figures from the Dutch intellectual and political landscape were shown, including the Dutch activist and artist Quinsy Gario (Quinsy, 2014–15), one of the leading figures within the Zwarte Piet debates; Gloria Wekker, author of the hugely influential White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race (2016), that exposed the contradictions at the heart of perceived Dutch tolerance, a shielded racism built up over 300 years as a colonial ruler that has left its mark on many facets of Dutch society. Kensmil’s biography was woven into the cast of historical and contemporary figures, most strikingly in the wall installation Dutch Nurses (2015), which showed the faces of Surinamese nurses, including Kensmil’s mother, who were asked to come to the Netherlands by the Dutch government in the 1950s and 1960s. Kensmil’s long-standing indebtedness to music and to the Black musicians who have inspired her was honoured in We The People Who Are Darker Than Blue (2011–), an ongoing series of portraits including the likes of Chuck D, Lauren Hill, Aretha Franklin and Curtis Mayfield. Next to the portraits, a pair of turntables played out a selection of the musicians’ tracks. Encountering such a cast of figures – ranging from historic icons and family members to anonymous models – is to enter Kensmil’s milieu, the people that continue to inspire her as an artist and a person. In a wonderful text on friendship, artist Céline Condoreli suggests that the notion of friendship need not be restricted to a relationship between people, but should also encompass the ideas and politics one holds affinity with; the books we read, the theories that inspire us or the music we listen to. In this sense we can view both the people, Kensmil’s cast of characters, and the ideas they carry with them as Kensmil’s artistic, intellectual and ideological friends. Culture, Hannah Arendt eloquently stated, is ‘the company that one chooses to keep, in the present as well as in the past’.
Do we treat these images of people as prompts to discuss their lives and their ideas? Or are the personalities secondary to the manner in which Kensmil depicts them and installs these portraits on the walls of the gallery: The format of the portrait itself, the treatment of paint, of light and colour within the works; the fact that, in Voices Across the Ocean, for example, Garvey and Davis were hung on a wall painting referencing Piet Mondriaan’s Composition in Line, Second State (1917), or the horizontal sequence of 11 portraits that made up Dutch Nurses intersected by 8.7 cm-thick strips of blue-black paint on the wall in a clear nod to the institutional critique of Daniel Buren. Or do we simply consider what it means to bring these figures together, presented as if in an ongoing narrative, within the white cubes of a Dutch art gallery and art world that has excluded Black histories, voices and faces for so long? The power of theses portraits lies in their claim on the viewer to do multiple forms of aesthetic, intellectual and historic work. It is vital that we pay attention to the choices Kensmil makes in who she represents as well as how she organizes and mediates her practice – what art historian Darby English would call its ‘strategic formalism’. In doing so we are able to view the aesthetics and politics of Kensmil’s practice as both reinforcing and complicating one another.
Look through the histories of the people presented in the portraits shown at Club Solo, all painted from photographs either owned by the artist or sourced from books and newspapers, and you will notice that they hum with a soft light emanating from beneath the surface. It is most clearly sensed in the warm glow that comes from Here the New Negro Begins or Angela #2. The effect comes from the undercoat Kensmil uses as one of the first stages on the painting process giving her figures an unmistakable luminosity. The technique was used by nineteenth century impressionist painters such as Edgar Degas (1834–1917) and Édouard Manet (1832–1883), formative influences on Kensmil’s painting who discarded the traditional dark undercoat for a layer of white paint. Manet in particular used it to capture the energy and vibrancy of the modern world in an iconic image of modernist art history such as A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882). In contrast, Kensmil’s light undercoat serves to light up historical figures who, in the Netherlands at least, have been kept in the shadows, and to underscore their importance for our present.. Manet, Degas et al. depicted the crowds of people at the bars, restaurants and theatres of Paris in the second half of the nineteenth century that spoke to the changing reality of life around them. When Kensmil turns her attention to the streets of our modern world, she depicts the masses gathered at the protests in Charlotte or a march against Zwarte Piet in the Netherlands to document, in painterly form, the markers of today’s change. The streets of our cities , she seems to say, are alive with a different energy. Significantly, just as the modernist painters marvelled at the energy of their modern world, Kensmil’s paintings and works on paper convey the vitality of the struggles they depict. What emanates from these images is the creativity of the counterculture and those behind it rather than the power of oppressors. Kensmil stands with and celebrates those she paints.
Kensmil’s relationship to modernism – and that of her painted subjects – is made more complex when we look at the way in which she appropriates formal motifs of twentieth-century modernist painters in her installations. Returning to Voices Across the Ocean, the paintings were hung over a blue/black-on-white wall painting that referenced Mondriaan’s composition. The wall painting in Rhythm of Dutch Spoken Words, including the portraits Black Star (2015) and Akwasi (2015), was based on the distinct horizontals, verticals and diagonals of Theo van Doesburg. Mondriaan and van Doesburg, members of the Dutch movement De Stijl, are the epitome of a modernist aesthetic – their clean lines and use of black, white and primary colours emblematic of the formalism of European modernism. In Kensmil’s wall paintings, the modernist composition morphs from being contained in a discrete canvas into an immersive background, a visual and conceptual landscape through which we encounter Garvey, Davis and Akwasi. These figures now hang within a modernist history from which they were hitherto excluded. Kensmil quietly insists that Akwasi, painted in the same palette of dark blues and blacks as the wall painting, is part of this Dutch modernist heritage too. Equally, the claims of Pan-Africanism and Black feminism that Garvey and Davis fought for are an essential part of the aesthetic, political and cultural archive of modernism. Kensmil’s references to modernism are not limited to De Stijl or Dutch art history. The abstraction of the Russian avant-garde and the cool lines of Buren’s American institutional critique appear in Study in Black Modernity and as the backdrop in Dutch Nurses, respectively. Kensmil pushes us to reconsider the canon of art history, not from national or historical perspectives, but from one that includes the myriad voices of Black counterculture and the intellectual propositions that have challenged the hegemony of white modernism.
‘Coloniality’, semiotician and decolonial theorist Walter Mignolo writes, ‘is constitutive of modernity. ‘Modernity’, Mignolo continues, ‘is a complex narrative whose point of origination was Europe; a narrative that builds Western civilization by celebrating its achievements while at the same time hiding its darker side: ‘coloniality’.[1] Through a decolonial reading, Kensmil’s images of Garvey, Davis and Akwasi make visible the historical and contemporary resistance to modernity’s ‘darker side’. But, whereas de-colonial thinking would insist on delinking the different elements that constitute the matrix of modernity/coloniality, Kensmil instead invites us to reimagine modernity with Garvey, Davis et al. inside the frame. In this sense, Kensmil’s position is closer to that of artist Rasheed Araeen, who claimed that art history needs to be rewritten from a truly inclusive, transnational perspective, not one that views Black and non-Western artists in constant deferral to the Western canon. That Kensmil’s depiction of Garvey glows with luminosity, a technique ostensibly borrowed form the early modernists, makes Kensmil’s painterly game with modernism all the more compelling.
In a conversation between curators Jelle Bouwhuis and Paul Goodwin, Goodwin makes an insightful comparison between Kensmil’s portraits with those of another contemporary portrait painter, Willem Sasnal. Goodwin distinguishes between the ‘ironic detachment’ of Sasnal’s ‘cool light’ and the manner in which Kensmil depicts her subjects. I would extend Goodwin’s distinction to note that the manner in which Sasnal’s practice stems from a sense of alienation in contrast to the empathy and solidarity Kensmil imparts on her sitters. Sasnal captures the alienation he felt at the rampant commercialization of Poland after 1989 – it is a sense of dislocation between the contemporary world and what came before, in the case of Poland the break from socialism to rampant neo-liberalism. Kensmil’s work, however, appears invested in creating connections between different historical and contemporary moments, locating history in the present. She is seeking to confirm, as Goodwin writes, ‘the reality of [her subjects’] historical existence’ – in a way that past and present are not demarcated but appear as a living, ongoing narrative. Such an approach also marks out Kensmil’s practice from other contemporary portraitists such as Marlene Dumas and Luc Tuymans. While clear similarities can be seen in the presentation of Kensmil’s We the People Who Are Darker than Blue with a series such as Dumas’s Models (1994), in the use of a large grid of faces, the warmth of Kensmil’s figures stands in contrast to the not-quite-human treatment Dumas gives her subjects.

Discourse as medium
Kensmil’s proposition for the reimagining of modernity (as a historical period) and modernism (as a cultural project) is reinforced through the relationship with discourse in her work – present either through the portraits of intellectuals or the inclusion of publications in her installations. Importantly, the references she invites us to consider place her work within a wider cultural, theoretical and historical context. As part of the Club Solo exhibition, a series of ink-on-paper drawings were presented next to a shelf of books in a hallway – under the title: From my Library. As would appear later in Study in Black Modernity, figures with whom Kensmil holds strong political and intellectual affinities were present. Philomena Essed featured, whose powerful book Alledaags racisme / Everyday Racism (1984) charts the parallels between the racism experienced by Surinamese Dutch women and African-American women. The converging and contrasting histories and ideas that emerged from the encounters with and responses to racism in the US and the Netherlands permeate much of Kensmil’s imagery and many of her references over the past decade. It is visible in the mural To Determine the Destiny (2007). Next to Essed was Gloria Wekker, who 26 years after Everyday Racism would publish White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race (2016), translated into Dutch two years later. The converging and diverging histories of Black experiences in the Netherlands and America was played out again in the selection of books Kensmil chose to include on the bookshelf, which people could pick up and read. Ellen Ombre’s novel Negerjood in moederland (2004), the story of a Dutch girl who, having left her home in Amsterdam, contemplates the history of her Surinamese parents, was placed next to James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (1963), whose two essays address, from very different stylistic and historical perspectives, questions of race and struggle across generations. Above the shelf, Essed is shown looking down in the direction of the books, as if approvingly contemplating Kensmil bringing Dutch and American perspectives into such close proximity.
Kensmil’s work has often combined different formats and media. Text and image appear in her early paintings and from 2006 in installations such as The Problem of Defence (2007) and Then They Marched (2008), two works that touched on the enduring themes of resistance to racism and the feminist struggle. The early installation House of Dreams (2005) included a pile of painted books in front of a large canvas comprising many portraits. The installation in the hallway of Kensmil’s Club Solo exhibition was the first time she presented publications – the material outcome of theoretical, creative and discursive formulations – as an explicit and legible component in her work. In Study in Black Modernity, Kensmil developed this further. Amongst a much larger selection of pen and ink drawings, and sitting between two large wallpapers of reproduced texts, was a mounted shelf of books. Here, the relationship was not so much with text and image as with discourses and histories. A bibliography that spanned 60-odd years and included sociology, novels, cultural studies from the US, the Caribbean and the Netherlands. a roll call of Black intellectuals for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These books are containers of knowledge; placed behind glass in the installation itself, they also constitute a discursive and political history that has been placed out of reach or neatly contained, particularly by the Dutch modernist museum. Returning to Pollock and Williams, they are a pointer to the conditions of Kensmil’s practice and a context through which we should understand her work: from the different histories of Black struggle, the lived reality of racism in the Netherlands or the extraordinary creativity that has come out of articulating forms of counterculture. Understood in this way, foregrounding the discursive is a rebuttal to modernism’s deeply held belief in the primacy of the unique art object that should be read in isolation. Black modernity, Kensmil seems to say, demands that we approach artworks, history, discourse and lived experience as informing one another. Black modernity, Kensmil infers, did not have the luxury of living in privileged isolation from social, political and cultural conditions – it had to confront history, take it with it along the way towards an inclusive time-to-come. The abstracted future horizon of modernism becomes extended, emboldened and enlivened by the lived experience of counterculture in multiple presents. The choice of an appropriated composition from an unknown painter of the Russian avant-garde as the backdrop to these discourses and experiences points towards Kensmil’s affinities with some of modernism’s most radical thinkers. In Kensmil’s retrospective reimagining of modernism, the different trajectories of Black creativity, intellectual work and the fight against inequality receive their rightful place. In this sense, Study in Black Modernity, following Paul Gilroy, ‘reconstructs its own critical, intellectual, and moral genealogy’.
In both a generous and strategic move, the artist gave a duplicate set of books presented in the installation to the museum’s library. It extended the presence of the books in Study from being discursive signifiers to active infiltrators into the knowledge the museum holds. Placing the books in the library for the public to read removes the excuses for a Dutch modernist institution like the Van Abbemuseum and its public not to know, or think, or study the conditions of practice. When we encounter the black and white images of protestors of the Black Lives Matter movement alongside those of the Zwarte Piet protest or a portrait of Wekker, the opening lines of Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic resonate from the wall: ‘Striving to be both European and black requires some specific forms of double consciousness’, he writes. Indeed, Gilroy’s text reverberates between the images and histories Kensmil lays out. His call to work past the ‘special political problem that arises from the fatal junction of the concept of nationality and the concept of culture’ complicates the way we read the specificities of, or affinities between, Dutch, American and South African racial oppression that Kensmil points to. In the same passage, Gilroy invites us to take ‘another, more difficult option: the theorisation of creolisation, metissage, mestizaje, and hybridity’. Embedded in the images that span Apartheid South Africa (Nelson Mandela), the fight for Black women to be heard in the US in the 1960s and 1970s (Davis), the women who articulate the problematics of race in the Netherlands today (Wekker and Essed) or the Dutch rapper Akwasi who speaks to this lived experience of racism in the Netherlands, is precisely the ‘stereophonic’, the ‘bilingual’ and the ‘bifocal’ that Gilroy calls for in the opening pages of The Black Atlantic. This too offers a clue to how Kensmil might want us to study Black modernity, as a modernity not fixed on a linear trajectory with clearly defined origins and end points, but one constantly drawing from an evolving constellation of inspirations and struggles. Encountering the complex arrangement of figures, discourses and imagery in Study in Black Modernity is also to encounter the right to opacity put forward by philosopher Édouard Glissant, whose seminal Poetics of Relation (1997) is also included in the installation. Kensmil, following Glissant, puts forward relations and meanings without the need to resolve and explain every connection, a rebuttal to the perceived transparency of white modernity that was presented as universal truth from the Enlightenment onwards.

Kensmil highlights the ‘bi-focal’ relationship between discourse and image by enlarging scans of text as wallpaper. Significantly, the words are in Dutch. As artist and curator Charl Landvreugd has pointed out, so much of the language pertaining to Black studies in the Netherlands, or what he calls the Afro-Dutch condition, particularly within the arts, has often been lazily imported from the Anglosphere. While such a move is understandable given the theoretical and cultural work that has been carried out on either side of the Atlantic, it of course misses the specific conditions of the Netherlands, its colonial past and the way its legacies have sedimented across different facets of Dutch language and culture. While Kensmil’s work draws from the images, histories and discourse of the US and Britain over the past few years, she has very deliberately set it in conversation or contestation – with the specificity of the Dutch context and the strength of People of Colour and the Black community in the Netherlands.
It is important to remember the context in which Study in Black Modernity was shown. Alongside the installation, Kensmil was invited by Annie Fletcher, the museum’s chief curator, to convene on the first day of the ten-day public programme Becoming More. Under the title ‘On Experience and Choices’, Kensmil invited Gloria Wekker to give a keynote lecture based on the central themes of White Innocence. Prominent Black intellectuals and practitioners working in the Netherlands spoke during the event: Ernestine Comvalius and Andre Reeder, activists from the 1970s who now lead the Bijlmer Park Theatre in Amsterdam; Mitchell Esajas and Jessica de Abreu (The Black Archives), curator Wayne Modest and writer Simone Zeefuik, among many others. Read in dialogue with Study in Black Modernity, ‘On Experience and Choice’ grounded the polyphonic history laid out on the wall outside the auditorium within the cultural conditions of the Netherlands in 2017. It served as an embodiment of the complex discursive portraiture that Kensmil mapped out in two dimensions on the wall outside and the conditions of practice within the Netherlands. Study in Modernity and ‘On Experience and Choice’ offered the discursive, historical and experiential potential for different constituents of the museum – and for the institution itself – to ‘become more’.

‘Black utopian feminists’
Kensmil’s presentation as part of The Measurement of Presence in the Rietveld Pavilion in Venice in 2019 marks a new phase in her dialogue with art history, modernism and modernity. The encounter Kensmil staged between figures such as Garvey, David and Akwasi with the composition of Mondriaan and De Stijl becomes spatialized within the light-filled spaces of Rietveld’s 1954 building. Standing in the Rietveld Pavilion, commissioned by the Dutch government, is to experience a physical encounter with Dutch and European modernism and its exposure within the particular milieu of an art world that in the 1950s was decidedly white, male and Western. Lining the walls of the pavilion will be the faces of what Kensmil has named ‘Black utopian feminists’. These include heroines like Audrey Lorde alongside another iconic Black feminist, bell hooks (b. 1952), the Pan-Africanist Amy Ashwood Garvey (1897–1969), DJ and singer Sister Nancy (b. 1962), journalist and activist Claudia Jones (1915–1964), communist and activist for Surinamese independence Hermina Huiswoud (1905–1998 ), anti-colonial writer and surrealist Suzanne Césaire (1916–1966), and feminist science-fiction novelist Octavia E. Butler (1947–2006). The portraits, like those of Davis and Garvey in Kensmil’s Club Solo presentation, appear on a mural referencing Piet Mondriaan’s studio, combined with an appropriated version of Kazimir Malevich’s constructivist lines. The conflation of these two modernist traditions, which both insisted on art and creativity playing central roles in the formation and projection of the modern world, serves as a fitting backdrop for the faces and stories of these women. Their creativity, their history, Kensmil infers, should be central in how we now understand the developments of the modern world and its possibilities in the future.
In 1972 Gerhard Richter presented 48 Portraits (1971) in the neoclassical German Pavilion, built at the height of Nationalist Socialism in 1938. The portraits were of scientists, politicians and writers, among them Albert Einstein, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Oscar Wilde, Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka. Indeed, looking at 48 Portraits, one senses Richter’s influence on Kensmil – the framing of the portrait to include shoulders, neck and head, as well as the reduced palette and the fuzzy edges of the photorealist aesthetic. While much of the commentary on 48 Portraits selectively ignores the fact that no women or people of colour are included, instead focusing on the formal similarities between the portraits, we should not be blind to Richter’s choices. By the same argument that Kensmil decides to use her moment in the Dutch Pavilion to present portraits of inspirational Black women, this does not mean we should overlook the remarkable aesthetic sophistication of her paintings and installation – but it does mean we should pay due attention to the decisions she took in determining whom we encounter. Returning to Arendt, this is the company Kensmil ‘chooses to keep in the present as well as the past’. Richter decided not to include any artists in his selection for fear that he would be perceived as somehow positioning himself with (or against) other artists. Interestingly, a section of Kensmil’s presentation is given over to artists including Stanley Brouwn, David Hammonds and Adrian Piper, generously acknowledging the formative role these artists have played in her career.
If Black feminists have been recurrent presences in Kensmil’s work, never have they been so deliberately foregrounded as in the Dutch Pavilion. That Kensmil chose to do so within the Rietveld Pavilion, a building that comes to stand as a form of spatialized modernism, is significant. Griselda Pollock has cogently argued for understanding modernism and its early representations of women as sexualized and gendered, determined by the unequal power relations between men and women. In her essay ‘Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity’, for example, she points to the depiction of women by male painters as being concomitant with bars (Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, 1882) and brothels (Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907). ‘We must inquire’, she says, ‘why the territory of modernism so often is a way of dealigning with masculine sexuality’, before asking straightforwardly: ‘What relation is there between sexuality, modernity and modernism?’ It seems that Kensmil’s choice to invite these Black feminists into the Rietveld Pavilion is precisely to counter both the representations of women in modernist art history and to offer an alternative, Black feminist approach to art history itself. An art history that, through the presence of these women and, by inference, the ideas and struggles they fought for, insists on understanding practice as made up of multiple social and cultural conditions. A feminist art history, as espoused so powerfully by Pollock and others, that denounces the singularity, the finality of the single artwork and its male producer. Kensmil’s Black feminist, utopian art history goes further – it quietly exposes and then explodes the limitations of such outdated thinking.
Perhaps more fundamentally, the inclusion of these women under the guise of ‘Black utopian feminists’ reclaims the forward projection of modernism through the lens of Black feminism. The presence of Octavia E. Butler, whose science-fiction novels from the 1970s onwards can now be seen as foundational for the work of Donna Haraway, Sadie Plant and others, is instructive. Kodwo Eshun, the writer, theorist and member of The Otolith Group, has recently argued that Butler’s science-fiction writing puts forward the argument of ‘the human or humanity as a revisable project’. In a similar vein, the inclusion of Butler, Jones et al. in the Rietveld Pavilion lays claim to modernism and modernity itself as a revisable project, one where the hegemony of white men is countered by the presence and ideas of utopian Black feminists that simultaneously embrace science fiction, Pan-Africanism, poetry and music. Set against the composition in black and grades of blue-grey of Kensmil’s wall painting, these faces emerge, re-mixed and re-vamped, as the alternative future which modernity could have had. The brilliance of Kensmil’s gesture is that she makes going back to the future possible. What would it mean, she asks, if modernism, of which Rietveld, De Stijl and Mondriaan were a part, was reimagined with the creativity, intellect and politics that drove these ‘Black utopian feminists’? Such inspiring speculations permeate the different components of Kensmil’s work: the discourse she points to, the parallel histories she aligns, the presence of a political, art-historical and intellectual archive mediated through Kensmil’s artistic thinking. She invites us to consider different forms and moments of creative, political and discursive work as emancipatory tools, as conditions of practice to be worked with and through.

A conversation on the work of Iris Kensmil, Jelle Bouwhuis and Paul Goodwin

Published in exhibition catalogue: Iris Kensmil @ Club Solo, Breda 2015

Jelle Bouwhuis is curator at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam / Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam.
Paul Goodwin is a curator based in London. He is UAL Chair of Black Art and Design Studies, Professor of Transnational Curating and Director of the Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation (TrAIN) at University of the Arts, London.

Dear Paul, 

Currently much attention in the Netherlands is drawn to the acquisition, by the Rijksmuseum and the Louvre jointly, of two Rembrandt portraits for the astronomical sum of 160 million euro’s. It triggered me to start our conversation on the work of Iris Kensmil. After all, the body of work she presents in her exhibition in Club Solo is centred on the portrait. The Rembrandt case proves that portraiture – typical painter’s genre with a long standing in art history – is affected by a firm touch of national history. I think that Iris with her portraits of black people wants to insert the possibility of an alternative portrait tradition that is largely absent in the Western history of art. More than just offering a marginal addition to or adjustment of that history she signals a hiatus or rather, the monocultural bias in this history as it misrepresents humanity yet claims some sort of universalism. I hope you agree with me that this is a topic we should discuss alongside the works themselves that Iris presents in this exhibition. 

Dear Jelle,

Thank you for your initial commentary on Iris’s project. You have made a strong and passionate argument about the exclusions of the Western art historical canon and questions of nationalism. While I agree with you that it is impossible to disentangle art history from nationalism and related questions about universalism and representation, I also think we need to think really carefully about how this argument plays out in the case of black artists and the way their works are framed. Let me explain. I am developing a research programme on Black Artists and Modernism here in London at University of the Arts with the artist and professor Sonia Boyce and David Dibosa. This project seeks to identity core works of art by British Black and Asian artists in public collections in the UK and re-contextualise their works in relation to modernism (and contemporary art). The actual work of black artists in terms of aesthetic and stylistic questions too often tend to be subsumed beneath ‘external’ or contextual issues such as ‘race’, diversity and cultural policy or indeed questions of nationalism in public discourse. To address this problem we are applying to these works a kind of ‘strategic formalism’ to borrow a phrase from art historian Darby English in his excellent text ‘How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness’ (MIT Press, 2007). In other words we are bringing these works into an aesthetic and strategic dialogue with vital aspects of modernism and contemporary art practice from which they have often been separated. The analysis of works by black artists frequently suffers under the weight of what theorist Kobena Mercer calls the ‘burden of representation’ – i.e. the need to represent the whole black ‘race’ – thus obscuring their relative aesthetic autonomy and potentially diminishing their value in market and art historical terms.

Hi Paul,

Indeed, the attractiveness of framing is strong. On the other hand, this might account much more for the British situation (among others) where one can speak of a historical ‘black movement’ and an art historical ‘black art tradition’, whereas in the Netherlands the issue of framing or discussing any issue at all is commonly concealed behind positivist, formalist approaches. I think Iris plays out many of such issues on a stylistic level. Her historic portraits like those of Marcus Garvey, Angela Davis and James Brown are often done in a style akin to Gerhard Richter: based on historic photographs, painted or drawn with subdued colour. The subject matter is historically loaded – many of the portrayed stand out in a historical framework around black activism and emancipation — and in that sense she shows affinity with Tuymans and Marlene Dumas. Iris’s ‘live’ portraits differ from that: they are more coloristic and literally come alive. But all of them are thinly painted, she uses a “realistic” light from underneath the paint and never using highlights, in tandem with the history of early modern art beginning with Manet and Degas onwards. And the people portrayed have a fair share in beating colonial residues that are still around today, such as Gloria Wekker and of course Quinsy Gario who triggered the nation-wide Black Pete debate. So, the changes in style seem related to phases in what could be called a history of black emancipation; a continuous project, altered daily. I guess that is a form of progress and thus positivism, don’t you think?

Dear Jelle,

Your point about the differences in the British and Dutch situations with regard to black artists is well made and very pertinent here. As you say the development of ‘black art’ as an art historical question has a longer history in the UK than in the Netherlands where perhaps this question has not really been raised. And yet I see in Iris’s works and the way you described them, a possible opening and bridge between these two seemingly very different cultural and historical art worlds. First, in stylistic terms her works engage art history and more particularly Dutch and European traditions of modernism in dynamic and complex ways. I’m struck for example by the sheer number and diversity of artistic strategies she deploys in order to insert ‘blackness’ into the canvas and wider art history – from word-text juxtapositions that allude to conjoined histories of conceptual art and black activism (Keith Piper’s early works come to mind here) in Then They Marched; to the Van Gogh type dense overlay of colour, brushstroke and painterly gesture in a work such as The Widow; to the hazy washes of funereal dark colours that explore states of mourning and the death of historical figures – which is reflected through her appropriation of media and pop imagery in a dialogue with artists such as Wilhelm Sasnal and Luc Tuymans (James Brown is Dead), albeit with a more positivist intention. Let me explain: Sasnal paints cold light. His images reflect a kind of detachment and irony from the subject. So appropriation by Sasnal is irony (and distance from the culture in which he grew up). Iris on the other hand paints her subjects is a way that confirms the reality of their historical existence and importance. The attitude shown in her appropriation is one of respect or even reverence.
In retrospect the expressive mode of painting in her earlier works about black emancipation can be interpreted as reflecting the initial ‘anger’ of discovering and disclosing this history (like the young Keith Piper). But at the same time this ‘anger’ and passion while informing the style of the work does not determine it.
The second bridge relates to the transnational dialogue about blackness and art that is played out in her work. The work effectively stages a complex aesthetic conversation between traditions of black art and political activism; as well as art historical tropes and styles such as conceptualism, portraiture and drawing within the contexts of what Paul Gilroy calls ‘The Black Atlantic’ and Edouard Glissant calls ‘creolisation’. In other words Iris’ work in this series speaks to the broader transnational context of the aesthetics of blackness in referencing traditions of political radicalism and artistic practices in the Americas, the Caribbean and Africa. So I agree with you: I see in her work both ‘progress and positivism’ and at the same time it speaks to opening up a conversation about many of the vexed issues in the conservative Dutch and UK art worlds.

Dear Paul,

I agree. Shifting Colours, an installation she made together with Dutch artist Willem de Rooij is a nice example of her strategical use of all these aspects. She invited him when she was approached to show in the Tropenmuseum – the former colonial institute – in an exhibition about blacks after the abolition, called Black & White. Their seemingly pure esthetical presentation avoided each referenciality – contrary to the main exhibition – at the same time it thematised the polysemy of colour.
I want to add one more stylistic feature of Iris’ work: seriality. It is present in works such as De ware geest van ‘t vrije, vrije Suriname (The true spirit of the free, free Surinam) which refers to a very black page of Surinam’s post-colonial history, and of course in the series of portraits of black musicians in We the People who are darker than Blue, which is still on-going. I’m thinking of Boltanski, as her impulse to archive and order things is consciously used to emphasize a specific itinerary in cultural history.
A very important feature of the exhibition consists of the murals she has made, based on early abstract paintings of Mondrian from 1916-1918, which serve here as backdrops for some of the portraits of black persons. The murals refer to that phase of Dutch modernism that stands out with regard to progress and freedom both in art and society as a whole. With this conjunction I think Iris tells us that such positivism in our current era can only be sustained through taking the notion of a truly transcultural society at heart.
Let me finish with the most recent work in the show, Ferguson. In this pastel we see a couple among the riot fires, drawn after a photograph, in vivid colours. Iris added five ink drawings to it, for which she has chosen different cuts of the same photograph, capturing the woman’s fear. It is a way of storytelling and making drama inspired by comic books and graphic novels. One of the drawings the composition is mixed with the same Mondrianesque features as in one of the murals: it functions here as an expression of fear. I can’t prevent from reading this as a kind of warning: our institutions – not only the administrative and political but also our cultural institutions – are not yet into a transcultural mode of thinking in tandem with the changing demography in European and especially Dutch society today. Whereas the cultural institutions should fight for this in the frontline, hand in hand with artists like Mondrian. So again, I can’t prevent myself from allegorical reading. I do hope your work with Sonia will help us in finding a universal language that suits the transcultural future of art!

Shifting Colours

Exhibition Review by Ferdinand van Dieten 

The exhibition Black & White examines questions of colour in Dutch society today. Who is black and who is white? Who decides? How does the legacy of slavery affect the present? A multitude of questions and facts are presented alongside each exhibit on show. Off to one side, in a small gallery, a white octagonal space has been constructed which detaches the room from the decorative, fin-du-siecle architecture of the museum. This is the first thing that strikes you when you enter the space and see the large colour panels on the wall.

Three works by Willem de Rooij – two large and one slightly smaller – hang evenly distributed on the walls; woven fabrics on stretchers bearing an abundance of tonal pinks. The gaze is then drawn to the wealth of detail in the painted portraits by Iris Kensmil hanging in between; two large paintings of seated women and two smaller male portraits.

These abstract and figurative paintings go remarkably well together. In this context, the coloured surfaces of de Rooij’s bespoke woven fabrics become more painterly, revealing all the subtly and vibrance of the colours. In front of Kensmil’s paintings, one is immediately drawn to the hues of the skin tones and the dynamic pattern of the dress worn by one of the women. Each individual work and the presentation as a whole is emphatically aesthetic, with all the elements exuding meticulous care.

Iris Kensmil invited Willem de Rooij to partner her in this exhibition. Together they have made an installation that breaks free of the immediate context. But we know from earlier work by Willem de Rooij that there is more at play here than initially meets the eye. Essential to de Rooij’s work is the way in which he pushes to an extreme the decontextualizing force of the modernist white cube by using a highly precise aesthetic. This radical expulsion of referentiality is significant. Marcel Duchamp thematized decontextualization and transformed it into one of the ways art is made. In the reclamation of Duchamp’s work at the end of the last century, we see that, at a certain point, there was a moment of choice: What do we want decontextualization to do? Irony is possible, as is aestheticisation, and symbolism too – all strategies Duchamp himself deployed. But this way of working also gives rise to the freedom to present new relations and contexts; the opportunity to freely create meaning, released from references to that which is already known. The artist is able to generate this freedom by taking up Duchamp’s gesture and pushing it further into recontextualisation.

Pink never occurs in the Suprematist works of Malevich or in Mondriaan. There was no place for pink in the art of the new era, which they chose to communicate in pure forms and colours. Here, in de Rooij’s abstract works, pink is woven into the fabric in numerous gradations and hues. In the text accompanying the exhibition, curator Anke Bangma writes, ‘The dialogue with Kensmil’s portraits strengthens the associations evoked by the shades of pink. Is pink – used in painting to render the skin tones of white people – a better counterpart to black than seemingly neutral “white”? Or does pink conjure up associations with another, equally unresolved emancipation struggle?’

Iris Kensmil’s portraits in this exhibition are of migrants in former Dutch colonies: Ghanians who were recruited for the Royal Dutch East-Indian Army (KNIL) and called Belanda Hitam – black Dutch – by the inhabitants of the Netherlands East Indies; and Boeroes, descendants of poor Dutch peasants, who were the first white people in Suriname to carry out physical labour. She has called this series Displaced Persons. By choosing these subjects, she expands the common, all too selective perception of colonial migrants.

Iris Kensmil made her name with paintings of black people who made history. These were often activists of the Black emancipation struggle, such as Marcus Garvey or Gazon Matodja. By portraying them in a style derived from ‘Western’ painting traditions, Kensmil locates them firmly within the canon of European history. But she also consistently places her paintings within the context of autonomy in painting, resisting any linking of her themes to africanism or other quasi-authentic forms. Her stand on the style of painting relates thus analogous to the play between decontextualization / recontextualization that this exhibition highlights.

Iris Kensmil and Willem de Rooij’s installation is sited in a very special context, is delightfully harmonious, but, more importantly and in many different ways, it is a compelling statement about how to make art.

Text by Ferdinand van Dieten, March 16, 2014. Translation Annabel Howland.
Iris Kensmil, Willem de Rooij, Shifting Colours, 13 March – 4 May 2014, curated by Anke Bangma within the framework of the exhibition Black & White in the Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam.

A history for the future, Positions of Iris Kensmil

TEXT Ferdinand van Dieten / TRANSLATION Sranan Art Xposed/Cassandra Gummels-Relyveld

As mentioned earlier on in this SAX, the artwork Granmans Oso by Iris Kensmil was unveiled in Moengo on Sunday the 28th of July. For the weeks preceding that, Iris Kensmil stayed in Moengo as artist in residence at Tembe Art Studio (TAS). The art of Iris Kensmil (Amsterdam, 1970) is about black self-awareness and the struggle for emancipation. In 2009 she participated in the Wakaman – Drawing Lines, Connecting Dots project in Suriname. During her residency, on June the 27th, the artist gave a presentation at the Nola Hatterman Art Academy together with her husband Ferdinand van Dieten. Regrettably, the turnout was very poor. Fortunately though, Sranan Art Xposed (SAX) has found Ferdinand van Dieten willing to put his presentation in writing. Below is a abrivated version. 

1 – Iris Kensmil is a Black European

Since 2000 the work of Iris Kensmil is represented by Galerie Ferdinand van Dieten and it is regularly on display. The early works with the non-figurative personal “stories” was especially appreciated for its painterly qualities and sold well to private artbuyers. Various museum curators—also Rudi Fuchs—started to follow the work. In 2004 Iris Kensmil started to make work about black self-awareness and the struggle for emancipation. At the same time her work became figurative. When the results of those choices were coming to light, the interest from museums gradually was growing. For exhibitions and purchases of her work, they are currently the most important group. Dutch individuals prefer to leave being interested in “exotics” to the professionals, they themselves rarely are.

Iris Kensmil was raised in Suriname from the age of one until nine, but as an artist she was formed in the Netherlands, thus in Europe. And she is (mostly) black. The problem however, is that “Black Europeans” do not exist. There is no place where, as a Black European, you will encounter an image from your history. The Europeans—and especially the Dutch—have no interest for it. In Europe, the United Kingdom is the only place where there has been a discussion about Black Art. In the USA, unlike Europe, being black and the relationship of black people to America is an urgent theme indeed. And there have been many debates about Black Art there as well. But Black Europeans are not recognized in America and they place Iris Kensmil in the category of the Caribbeans (and make no mistake, there this means: a significant step lower on the social ladder compared to African-Americans and African-Africans, somewhere close to Latinos).

2 – Iris Kensmil and Black Art

What position has Iris Kensmil actually taken on Black Art? Her work in the past ten years has been inspired by a question about identity as a black person. Due to this question, her work is part of the Black Art movement. But for her identity, she is not searching for roots. Her focus is on the present and the recent history. Not the origin, but the future is her criteria to know where she herself stands. The future, as it has been influenced also by the struggle for emancipation, the struggle of black people. For the sake of that question about such active historical role, slavery isn’t—just as roots are not—a theme in the work of Iris Kensmil. For her, this future-oriented identity takes shape by making images of the black emancipation, which will become part of the historical canon. 

3 – Iris Kensmil as an artist

The content of a work of art is determined not only by the theme, but mainly by the choices for forms, choices which influence the way one experiences the image regardless of what it represents. Iris Kensmil has always had the ambition to be an artist who with her own style, aiming to differentiate herself from all familiar images, aiming for a unique position compared to other art, through which the work permanently retains its significance in the collective memory, also outside of the original context. She has always fought to find forms that are exactly right for her themes, and are not already, in another way known, and thus already loaden with associations. The style of herown, gives her a position in art history.
Iris Kensmil paints and draws in a European way. This can be seen in her emphasis on use of lighti, on the unity of foreground and background, on touch and on materiality. In the forms of her imagery—just as with her themes—, Iris Kensmil does not chose African origins (or what is considered as such by people who express their identity by working in a style, which everybody deems to recognize as African). Though, I must emphasize here, that not every use of ‘Africanisms’ refers to a roots-idea. Conceptual artists such as Chris Ofili, Yinka Shonibare and Meschac Gaba use excessive African visual language with irony. They consciously do that to challenge that origin-based way of thinking and to compel people to free the content of their work from it. See Contemporary African Art in the times of Intense Proximity at the Triennale 2012.
For Iris Kensmil her own style, with European drawing and painting techniques, has the effect that her images of black heroes become a part of the historical canon within the culture in which she lives and works.

Captions
1 – Time, Trade & Travel was an exchange project between Ghana and the Netherlands. For this Kensmil created work about cultural exchange – but not Ghana-the Netherlands, but Ghana-Suriname and Ghana-USA – and about the shifting of meanings when exchanging forms. In the Netherlands the work was looked at as a type of ethnography, while in Ghana the play with various forms and cultures was seen and recognized. From left to right: the wax panels: Akan Chief and Saramacca Door and right the wall with screen prints about W.E.B. Du Bois.
| PHOTO G.J. van Rooij, 2012

2 – King Dead. The struggle of the African Americans most closely offers, for Black Europeans, an image of their own history. For Iris Kensmil, Suriname also belongs to her background. | PHOTO G.J. van Rooij, 2007

3 – In the Schuttersgalerij of the Amsterdam Museum http://hart.amsterdammuseum.nl/62426/en/out-of-history there are currently three (155 x 105 cm) oil portraits by Iris Kensmil on display, of Surinamese people who, against the colonial oppression, built up their own position and future. They are Elisabeth Samson (1715-1777), Wilhelmina Kelderman (1734-1836) and Fabi Labi Breyman. Elisabeth Samson was a freeborn black woman who managed to accumulate assets in excess of one million guilders. She was the first black woman to enter into a legally recognized marriage with a white man. Wilhelmina Kelderman bought her own freedom. She traveled to the Netherlands and later managed to also buy the freedom of her son. Fabi Labi Breyman was Granman [captain] of the Okanisi: the first Maroon group to sign a treaty with the colonial rulers in Suriname in 1760. | PHOTO Courtesy artist, 2013

Another version of this text appeared in de Ware Tijd on July 31, 2013.

Ferdinand van Dieten is agent for artists, amongst which Iris Kensmil https://www.iriskensmil.nl/, and he is artdealer. He continues to build on the 24 year gallery ownership of Galerie Ferdinand van Dieten – Galerie d’Eendt www.dieten.biz. He has published texts within the framework of themed exhibitions of the gallery, such as The painting and the memory of painting, and ‘Transnihilistische propositions’ and for projects and catalogues of his artists.
Eventueel nog een bijschrift:
Work by Chris Ofili, Yinka Shonibare and Meschac Gaba | PHOTOS Courtesy artists 

The history of the Universal Negro

Hendrik Folkerts, in Metropolis M, 29 November 2008.

Amsterdam
Galerie Ferdinand van Dieten – D’Eendt
22/11/08 – 22/12/08

‘Yes, we can. Yes, we did.’ The famous slogan, issued from the presidential campaign of Barack Obama, marks the outset of the solo exhibition Get Up, Stand Up by Iris Kensmil in gallery Ferdinand van Dieten – d’Eendt in Amsterdam.

Kensmil displays her recent works in painting, drawing and installation, which seek to give an account of the emancipation history of black people, specifically in the United States. Her work emphasises on iconic figures and movements who helped to shape this history, such as the Black Panthers and Marcus Garvey (founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League). In choosing these particular examples Kensmil walks a fine line between historical documentation, or a consideration of history, and artistic engagement.

While the theme of the emancipation history of black people covers all works on display, they differ greatly in execution. Nevertheless, the intertwinement of word and image, always a characteristic element in Kensmil’s art, also remains evident here, for example in Our Battle Cry (2008).

On the one hand there are paintings. In canvases as the before-mentioned Our Battle Cry and Universal Negro (2008) we see a painting style reminiscent of works from the beginning of Kensmil’s career in which the paint was applied equally thick in small brush strokes.

However, there has been a change in atmosphere. Whereas the colours in earlier examples of the artist’s work such as Funky Funky (2003) were more warm, vibrant and exotic, the mood has now shifted to a darker, at times even obscure, and more serious tone.

The exhibition also presents drawings, executed on paper with casein, ink, tempera and pastel. The three key works in this section Then They Marched (2008), The True Meaning (2008) and Their Spirits (2008) (in image left-middle-right) form an installation, in which portrait mug shots of Black Panther activists are shown overlaying and accompanying textual battle cries that relate to this African-American movement. All the drawings, even the enigmatic If the Negro is Inferior (2007), have an exceptional persuasive quality about them. They literally draw up a history of suffering and struggling. Yet simultaneously, in the gaze of the portraits/mug shots and the stature of the standing figures, these images bear witness to a dignified but imperative call for black people (or in this case, African-Americans) to be participants in world history.

Get Up, Stand Up is first and foremost an exhibition that is concerned with a history of emancipation. Kensmil’s work describes that history by foregrounding some of its greatest protagonists. Although the texts in or guiding the images often embrace the activism that goes with the black emancipation history, the images never directly call for this kind of engagement. They reveal the activists, showing their combative, vulnerable or disheartened side. Somewhere in between the image and the text, in the middle of history and activism, the spectator can decide for him/herself.

Kensmil’s approach of history is however not necessarily a critical one. For instance, looking at Universal Negro or the artist’s Surinam background in comparison to her depiction of the African-American history, the question rises if this claim of universality is legitimate. Is there such a thing as the negro and an universal black emancipation or should this struggle be defined in more specific cultural, national or even regional terms? Maybe a history of emancipation should be differentiated further, but Kensmil’s art proves—as did the world-wide responses to the campaign and election of Barack Obama—that the sentiment is in fact universal. Mr. President together with “Yes, we can. Yes, we did” does in this sense not only mark the beginning of this exhibition but also a next stage in the history that Kensmil is elucidating. It is a new icon, a new point of departure, stemming from a long line of predecessors, as if the artist were to say: “Yes, we always have.”

Get Up, Stand Up

Ferdinand van Dieten in conversation with Iris Kensmil, in Negroes [are oké], artist monograph, Amsterdam 2008.

Ferdinand van Dieten: I have followed your work since the year 2000. At that time, you made paintings which depicted only text, for example, Negroes (are oké), and Thinking and since 2003, your work has for the most part been figurative. In both periods you have always said in explanatory remarks that you paint a ‘memory’. What do you mean by that?
Iris Kensmil: First of all I must explain how I start working on a painting. I collect images and texts, via the Internet, out of books and newspapers, pictures of other paintings. These images lie around my studio. At a certain point a particular image will return to my mind. Then I seek it out and make a painting of it.

So it is important that an image pops back into your mind.
Yes, I work out what makes the image important in a drawing, and then I start the painting.

In your mind, the memory is already a meaningful image, which you then embody in the drawing. What is the importance of painting it after that?
It’s a certain necessity, the drawing is not enough. A drawing can be just as interesting as a painting, but in a different way. The painting is a struggle between the material and the image, and there is the tension of how can I work the oil paint in order to turn dimensions, texture, colour and form into an image. I have to consider the relations between the colours, between the forms etc., to judge them and then adjust them.
The drawing goes faster, it is a gathering together of ideas that you almost jot down on paper. The painting must be built up, which takes more time. And then you achieve a result that no longer has a beginning or end, there is a cohesion between all parts that is meaningful as a whole. It transcends the time in which you have been working on it. ¹

This idea contradicts a commonly held view that the peculiarity of the arts lies precisely in the process of its making, as abstract expressionism showed in extremis, yet wouldn’t you say that there is not so very much difference between drawing and painting, as for example is evidenced by the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat?
Basquiat’s paintings are more heavily charged than his drawings. With him, a drawing is more of a written picture; he goes deeper into things with painting. You do see a handwriting, but the whole also has no beginning or end. For that matter, it is also true for Jackson Pollock that the whole cannot be reduced to the process of the making.

Your parents come from Surinam and you yourself lived there from the age of one until you were nine. That is reflected in your work in personal impressions. Recently you made a wall painting, Who Speaks (December 82), about the December murders in Surinam in 1982 by the regime of Desi Bouterse, which in terms of style is reminiscent of some of your works on the Black Panthers. How should I interpret such work?
I think this manner of working is fitting for the historical topic, but it is also personal. In 1982, I went back to Surinam with my parents and my sister, Natasja. That was the first time since I had left. The situation in the country was tense; it was a short time after the coup d’état and there was a curfew and the air was buzzing with talk about what was going on. People were afraid, wondering who was going to be a victim; you could not speak out. In our family a cousin by marriage, a lawyer, was killed.

How do you look back at that experience now?
Because I had known a totally different Surinam, it was strange to experience all that tension, to see how the country was going downhill. Independence actually should have been a celebration but there was a tragedy going on, and it still is.
The other Surinam paintings, like Busstop and Hope To See You Soon, have an entirely different character.
Yes, that is much more what I inherited from my youth, the colours, the odours, which are different, the light. In 2003, I went there again. By that time I was already an artist and could see much better what I had missed in the Netherlands. The trip enabled me to figure it all out and when I was back in my studio I could use that in my work. I was already busy with black consciousness. But after I had been back in Surinam, it became even clearer to me that I wanted to go deeper into that in my work.

When I look at your early work, I discern personal memories that gain deeper meaning, visual strength, in a painting. But with your recent work I see historical images of black people and black emancipation movements in America. In what way is this theme so important for you that these works become ‘memories’?
Those images fascinate me. Being black is an emotionally charged issue for me, and black emancipation even more so. The emancipation movement was before my time, but when I think about myself as a black person, I end up at emancipation.

You recognize yourself in a movement you did not participate in.
Yes, emancipation is a part of history for me, just like for everyone else, but I have a connection with it. It is a beautiful history, including its awful aspects, which fascinates me.

I see two different sides in those movements. You have the non-violent movement for an independent life or even a separate country for blacks, with Marcus Garvey and the integration movement with Martin Luther King on the one side, and the struggle against the violent white-dominated society by Malcolm X, and later the Black Panthers, on the other side. How do you see that element of struggle adding to the way Garvey and King envisioned emancipation?
Malcolm X is a fascinating hero. He was a street criminal. In prison he started thinking about why he straightened his hair, read the Koran and joined the Black Muslims. He was a terrific speaker, who offered large groups of blacks an alternative for their inferior position in so-called ‘Christian’ America.
The pictures of Malcolm X and the Black Panthers emanate an aura of power; they show they are not afraid. They appear in public openly, they defend themselves against the local police. They show that you can stand up for yourself, react against the violence you are subjected to – if you know the law the way Huey Newton, one of the leaders of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, used his knowledge of the law.
Having an aura of power is also part of emancipation. The return to Africa and the ‘black industry’ that Marcus Garvey wanted never happened but he is impressive as the initiator of a movement and a symbol of black self-confidence. The way I personally see it, there is no difference between King, who successfully fought for equal civil rights and integration, and Garvey and Malcom X, whose movements were undermined and defeated. ²

Your explanation about the specific overtones you are looking for in these historic images is clear. But isn’t it true that one should leave an historic picture in its original state as much as possible in order to remain as close as possible to the original story? What significance does it have for you to take such a picture and rework it?
An historic photograph represents a particular part of an earlier story. That story is important, but I don’t want to tell the whole thing all over again. So each of these parts is now separate, an image in itself. I use black-and-white pictures. I don’t want to be distracted by colours, because colours as they relate to one another are a personal experience. But neither do I use the whole of the black-and-white image, as it is not coherent due to the lack of a visual relationship between the forms. That’s why I can cut up a black-and-white image and then put the pieces back together again, not by means of a new story, but by means of a coherent image, which I achieve by making the painting into a whole through colour contrasts, surface structure, relative size and such means.

And as an extra visual element you use text. In your figurative works you placed the texts on top of the image; in your recent paintings the texts form a thick base under the image, one that is often no longer legible.
Experimenting with different placements of text in relation to the image always produces new ways to make a painting good, and it gives you the freedom to rediscover image and text. Most of those texts come from the black emancipation movement, or from the writers like Ben Okri.
Before, the texts completed the image. Now the figurative image is elevated above the text – although the text is still very important, because it is a kind of history, a history that you can feel, as it were, but can’t quite manage to decipher. It has become fainter, while still very obviously being present, sometimes legible, other times not. On another level, in terms of making the painting, this base is important, for it feels as if you are painting against the grain.

1. This description of what makes a painting successful provokes further questions. Besides transcending the process of creating it, does an artwork also rise above the ‘horizon’ of the artist? Can a visual image ‘write history’, not as a chronicle, but as an image of inner coherency, of by-itself-ness, that amidst continuous change remains itself? Is there such a thing as transcending time within time? People used to see art in the light of a faith that also implied transcendence. With the loss of this faith, a negation of transcendence has taken its place. Since then, art criticism has referred to mystery or to the artist as the originator of a new design of the world – two barely credible ways of transcending the maelstrom of events. Would it not be better – just like people can secularize the concepts of faith and hope from which Martin Luther King Jr. conceived his idea of history – to again consider transcendence – in this case, art’s capacity to transcend time by fulfilling its meaning not only in its own time, but also throughout time – a part of today’s world? ↩︎
2. The American theologist James H. Cone argues in ‘Martin & Malcolm & America, a Dream or a Nightmare’ that the Christian churches should take inspiration from both King and Malcolm X. They are each necessary as complement and criticism of each other. Integration and segregation are both old traditions in ‘The Great Tradition of Black Protest’ (Vincent Harding). Malcolm X formulated the synthesis in his ‘The Ballot or the Bullet’ speech: ‘No, I’m not for separation and you’re not for integration. What you and I are for is Freedom. … We’ve just got different ways of getting it.’ (ibid, p. 247). This book is also recommended reading for those who want to understand later developments, for example, the speeches of Jeremiah Wright, the minister whose name is connected with Barack Obama. ↩︎

Reminders of the black struggle for emancipation

By Roel Arkesteijn, in: Respect! Forms of community. Contemporary art from the Netherlands. Catalogue, Amsterdam, 2006 pp. 134-141.

Iris Kensmil creates rocking paintings with postcolonial themes. She was born in Amsterdam but spent part of her youth in Paramaribo, the capital of Surinam, a country that be came independent in 1975 after centuries of Dutch colonization. In her work Kensmil draws on personal memories as well as a range of historical textual and visual material documenting struggles for black emancipation and independence, as well black consciousness. Kensmil is interested in the motives and personal histories of those involved in these struggles. In the absence of societal reflection in the Netherlands on the history of black emancipation, she creates a personal visual chronicle.

At first Kensmil produced fairly formal paintings with some what subversive texts that sounded like they came from rap songs—‘distress signals in oil paint’, as one reviewer characterized them. The texts broke through the rigid grid of her paintings, like pent-up cries from the heart which had to be released in an eruption. ‘Nigers (are OK)’, reads the title of one of the works from this period. Beginning in 2003, Kensmil introduced figures into her paintings: people on the street, family members, and freedom fighters, often based on photos. Her vitriolic palette of the syncopated Rasta-colours canary yellow, apple green, bright blue, and blazing red, remained, along with the raw, pock-marked skin tones that she achieves by mixing resin with her paint. The combination of provocative texts, tumbling perspectives, and wrenching oppositions between flat and textured elements produces edgy paintings that act as the visual equivalent of rap or ragga. The paintings seem to have as least as much to do with Afro-culture as with the art-historical examples to which Kensmil refers. Despite the charged subject matter she touches upon, her work remains subversive and cheerful thanks to her style, and it never preaches.

Since 2005 Kensmil has been making, along with paintings, complex installations in which she combines canvases with ‘objets trouvés’ she has painted or drawn on. For instance, for Respect! Kensmil created House of Day Dreams (2005). The work represents a homage to African, African American and Caribbean writers who are important to her. Against the back ground of a schematically drawn house she displays a gallery featuring portraits of Ben Okri, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Maryse Condé, James Baldwin, and Ellen Kuzwayo, amongst others. In the Installation Free, Free at Last (2005), Kensmil sets up a fictional pantheon of fighters for black emancipation — people who left their mark on the black struggle for independence and freedom over the last two centuries. She presents portraits of Marcus Garvey, Patrice Lumumba, Angela Davis, and Nelson Mandela, amongst others, against the background of a map of American slave states. The installation also includes swings made of wooden benches. Similar benches were carved by Maroons in Suriname—descendants of escaped slaves who fled to the jungle. The canvas and benches are painted with texts by Martin Luther King Jr.