Farren Van Wyk :
An Identity of Absence
Here’s the thing about identity: it’s complicated. Something made of interconnected parts, rooted in place / time / bloodline / orientation / and lived experience. Layers and layers of parts that tell the story of who you are. Identity is not black and white.
This is especially true for South African and Dutch photographer, Farren Van Wyk, who’s award winning body of work, Mixedness Is My Mythology, explores the historical relationship between South Africa and the Netherlands, focusing on the connections and contradictions of migration, ethnicity, colonialism, and apartheid. Through a familial lens, she presents to us a personal reclamation of her Coloured identity, between two continents.
The global lockdown saw the beginning of Mythology, “I was feeling conflicted, I needed both homes. I had no idea when I’d be able to go back to South Africa.” Farren was born in Gqheberha, Eastern Cape and at the age of 6, relocated with her family to the Netherlands. Her practice is concerned with identity and citizenship, and by the time the pandemic was starting, she had been six months into her research on apartheid history.
“I was never told any apartheid stories growing up. At all. I only started understanding it at the age of 16, 17.”
Interestingly, Farren shares the difficulties of finding information about apartheid in the Netherlands, and the country’s overall avoidance of complex conversations surrounding race. “When I realised I was born in ‘93, during the last few years of apartheid. I thought that was significant, and I wanted to do something about it.”
I consider the powers that be’s unquenched insistence on progress or at least the illusion of it, which affects our perception of the passage of time. Three decades into South Africa’s democracy and the echo of the systematic separation can still be heard and felt by the most marginalised people in society. Through her research, she was learning the depths of the Dutch’s colonial presence. “I was understanding the layers of how, ever since Jan Van Riebeeck set foot on South African soil, chronically the Dutch have always been there.”
I felt disillusioned cause I never learnt about this at school here in the Netherlands. I felt so dehumanised by everything I was reading and seeing.”
However, it was when Van Wyk started seeing how her brothers were embracing their African heritage that propelled her to start the work. “They had found a positive outlook on this identity, through the way they were styling their hair or the clothes they were wearing.”
She started seeing the contradictions within her own experience, “We lived on this farm that had been owned by my Dutch grandfather, that my parents had taken over. I was thinking about how my grandparents in South Africa had been racially classified as Coloured and their land was taken away.”
In her photography, the agricultural Dutch farm became a contextualised backdrop juxtaposed by the presence of people of colour. During this period, Van Wyk was doing an MA in Cultural and Visual Anthropology, which allowed her to add more layers to the work by referencing significant imagery to support her evolving narrative.
On a museum visit, she encountered a presentation detailing the history of African women enslaved and brought to Suriname. From the 17th to the 19th century, women hid rice grains in their hair before being taken on slave ships, as a means of survival for themselves when they reached their unknown destination. It was this powerful presentation and J.D Ojeikere’s extensive photographic study of hair in West Africa, that made Van Wyk think more critically about the role of hair in the project.
“I believe hair is the carrier of our identity.
Instinctively, my brothers already knew this by the way they were playing around with their hair.”
On influence, Van Wyk speaks on writing by curator and scholar Dr. Candice Jansen, “I found a leaflet from an exhibition she curated where she spoke on the history of the word ‘Coloured’ for South African Coloured people, she expressed it as this ‘identity of absence’.”
These three words helped Van Wyk define what she was working on photographically, the truth in this idea was reaffirmed in her own experience when engaging with people. “When I'm in South Africa, people ask me where I’m from. But when I’m in the Netherlands, people still ask me where I’m from. I’d think to myself, ‘what is this thing that makes them think this is not where I am from?’”
Van Wyk shares how her not being an integral part of a community in both her home countries made her feel like an outsider in certain spaces. “It was only on the farm with my brothers where I felt like I could just be. They were also being asked these questions. But when we were together, we belonged.”
In the midst of identity’s black and white binaries, Farren is discovering the symbolism and possibilities in the shades of grey, and how in that space one can redefine themselves.
“I get to decide which shade of grey I want to be. I can mix them up, it doesn’t have to be just one thing.”
Mixedness Is My Mythology, is able to tackle difficult questions around race and colonialism, while also revealing the sensitive intimacies of a family. It is this duality that gives the work its contemporary importance, while bringing to the light the universal themes of love and connection.
Images©Farren Van Wyk
