The Hague artists

Marie Civikov’s work merges her grandmother’s written memoirs with archival photographs and bright interjections of dream-like images. Civikov’s grandmother was an indischwoman; born to a native Javanese mother named Painem and a Belgian father. The pastiche of visuals and text brings the past into the present, critically reflecting on the oftentimes privileged existence of indischpeople in the archipelago while bringing attention to current forms of colonial oppression. This series reflects on different aspects of the colonial economy: the import of colonially produced goods into the local economy (including Mauser rifles which are still used by the Israeli Occupation Forces on Palestinian soil today), the feudal systems of pay and usury on European-owned land, and the weighted use of the derogatory word koelie to describe informal and indentured physical labourers. The words used by Civikov’s grandmother illustrate colonial attitudes towards labour, and the alienation of native workers and peasants from the European bourgeois sensibility. Civikov’s artistic interpretation of her complicated family history represents the entanglements of the personal and the political. It carefully reveals the subtle ways in which social and economic class division permeate into perceptions of one's surroundings; urging a reflection on the ways these legacies continue to obscure the systems of oppression operating before our own eyes.

Exhibition view of Fortress of Forked Paths, curated by Àngels Miralda, part of Something Else IV, Darb Al Ahmar, Cairo, (Egypt), 2025 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.

Made during a residency at the Elias Canetti House in Ruse, hometown of my Bulgarian/Austrian ancestors, on whose archives this work is based, connected to stories of displacement in Gaza, 2024.

Gebaseerd op een verhaal over mijn Javaanse overgrootmoeder Painem, verteld door mijn grootmoeder.

performance and installation with Voin de Voin and Andrew Fremont-Smith, Ruimtevaart Den Haag

performance and installation in collaboration with Voin de Voin, Sofia City Art Gallery, Sofia (BG)

A cooperation/performance with Voin de Voin, bird suits, location pic, Sofia, 2017

Overzict solostand This Art Fair

Solo show at Structura Gallery, December 2022, Sofia

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