Family Affairs.
Sara Blokland, Daan van Golden, Peter Hellemons, Rini Hurkmans, Bert Sissingh/Sjoukje Boersma
5 April – 28 June 2009
The Stedelijk Museum Schiedam presents the exhibition Family Affairs from 5 April to 28 June 2009. Sara Blokland, Daan van Golden, Peter Hellemons, Rini Hurkmans, Bert Sissingh/Sjoukje Boersma. Family Affairs fans out from intimate worlds in living rooms, kitchens and gardens in full bloom of the Dutch home to the big world around. Series of photographs and video installations show family life in a variegated manner.
In images sparkling with the joy of living we see through a father's eyes how his daughter grows up in a world full of colour. But Family Affairs also knows oppressive examples of indoor commonality, where memories of the past are surfacing.
Sometimes the artists use shots made by relatives or others: varying from a last portrait honouring a memory to filing boxes full of family snaps found in an attic. Commonplace registrations form the point of departure for new structures, but ideals and stereotypes are also investigated and adapted. The images do not always correspond to reality: they play with their own artificiality and reveal that they have been engineered. Every photographer is a voyeur as well as a director; similarly, every subject of a portrait is the leading figure in his own life and at the same time a performer for an unknown audience.
Family Affairs mirrors the topical import of family relationships. The necessity to adjust standard patterns also takes shape in a search for kinship across continents.

Peter Hellemons
Our house with flowering front garden (1974) is an example of the ordinary, carefree way of life in the Dutch affluent society. It is one of thousands of slides found by Peter Hellemons (1957; lives and works in Schiedam) in the private collection of his father-in-law Leo Polhuis. Hellemons transformed a selection to an intimate album to put on the wall: Particulier Domein (Private Domain) (1999). Life seems more orderly than it really was: we see a model family from the sixties and seventies, but also the world of Hellemons's wife as a child. In De Reis I (The Journey) (2008) and De Reis II (2009), Hellemons shows his own family in holiday pictures that are a mixture of nostalgia and pipe dreams.

Daan van Golden
In his famous Youth is an Art (1978-96), Daan van Golden (1936; lives and works in Schiedam) lays the world at the feet of his daughter and the public at large.
The series comprises over one hundred photographs with Diana as the central figure, from her birth to her eighteenth year: sometimes at home in Schiedam, but more often in parks, zoos and museums, travelling through the Netherlands and the Far East, Central America or North Africa. The pictures, full of light and colour, show the father's affection for his daughter and substantiate Plato's piece of wisdom: ‘Beauty is love become visible'.

Bert Sissingh/Sjoukje Boersma
Bert Sissingh (1956; lives and works in Rotterdam ) photographs staged childhood memories, often in conjunction with Sjoukje Boersma. In The End of History (1996-99), he is shown with his elderly parents; in the later series The Family of Man (2001-03) with just his father. On the photograph Television (2009), we see him and his father (92) in pyjamas in a room where sheets seem to cover up the past as well as the future. Sissingh's work is both farcical and oppressing. Typical is the atmosphere of domestic seclusion of the fifties, when the optimism of the post-war reconstruction is dominated by memories of World War II.

Sara Blokland
The photographs and videos by Sarah Blokland (1969; lives and works in Amsterdam) adjust the corny images of families and individuals in a poetic manner. Her photo and video installations play with ideals and the fictive aspects of photography, but with its deceptive side as well. Her work is also a subtle post-colonial reflection on ‘individuality' and ‘the exotic': as on the stereotype of non-Western people, who were reduced to ‘exotic objects' in Western science and in museums. In her work Reproduction of Family (2008), Blokland responds to this with a confusing mixture of nature and culture, plants and portraits, people and objects. Beside an analytical observation, her installations are also an evocative invention, as in Father's Paradise , which shows her father by means of the photographs he made of his garden. The work is about identity, ideals and an aesthetic longing, but also – mindful of paradise – about migration and memories.

Rini Hurkmans
The images by Rini Hurkmans (1954; lives and works in Amsterdam ) compensate for hard reality. Hurkmans is trying to find a ‘home' in a world that is adrift. This Homeland , as several works are called, rises above the private domain. Hurkmans responds to the menace and horrors of violence. In the video diptych Blossom (2006), portraits of dead men pass by: Iranian victims of the war with Iraq . Next to them we see women buying and examining beautiful fabrics in the marketplace. For whom are they dressing up, when so many men are dead and buried? Blossom represents universal relationships: the bond between mother and son, husband and wife. At the same time it is a refuge for emotions caused by the loss of security and loved ones.
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Daan van Golden
Schiedam, 1989
foto uit de serie Youth is an Art, 1978-1996
16,5 x 26 cm
collectie Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam