Marie Civikov

Two paintings are mounted as hanging banners displaying diary entries written by an East Indies Grandmother. Marie Civikov uses painting to explore her post-colonial heritage which comes both from the Netherlands and from the traces it has left of Dutch colonial roots in Eastern Europe and Indonesia. Civikov’s own case is a unique glimpse into the stories that heritage can tell that are often left out of history or purposefully erased and forgotten including the history of the mixed families omitted from binary explanations of the colonial structure. In this project she uncovers the lived experiences of her grandmother, born to a Belgian settler father and an Indonesian mother, Civikov’s ancestor records her quotidian experience of the events surrounding the colonial wars of Indonesia that would lead to the territory’s independence. We see that world from her unique position as a child of colonial violence and conquest. Her diaries reveal the daily experiences of the colonial order and her perceived normality of social hierarchies, the stories are anecdotes that follow her family until their evacuation from Indonesia to the Netherlands in 1946.

Civikov’s use of layered materials and vivid color echo the fused styles of Dutch abstraction and Indonesian folkloric and revolutionary narrative painting. The works are made on factory-batik, a method of fabric printing that was developed in ancient practices on the island of Java and uses wax to seal pigment into cotton. Dutch-Indo European entrepreneurs developed the textile industry and shifted its production from traditional hand-crafted methods to an industrial scale for export, making fortunes from cheap local resources and the exploitation of Indonesian labour. Many of these factories were destroyed during the Indonesian war of independence.