STATEMENT OF WORK

As a Turkish/Moluccan kid born in Holland, I always had to adjust to my surroundings. When my parents divorced, I was forced to choose between Christianity and Islam. To keep both sides happy, I told them I believed in what they believed. I grew up going to the mosque on Fridays and the church on Sundays.

As I got older, I pulled away from both. As a rebellious teenager, I needed space. I found that space in the streets,through graffiti. The streets welcomed me. They gave me a sense of belonging. I found friends who had the same drive. We shared the same goal: to make marks, to be seen, to stand out. Style, freshness, and pushing boundaries—that’s where my motivation and foundation grew.

Being a graffiti artist is something else entirely. It’s a different kind of obsession;about making, communicating, finding your own way. That drive felt nothing like what I experienced later in art school. That world followed a system, a structure built on Western institutional standards. I tried to adjust, to serve that system. I gave it a shot. But instead of feeling original, I felt a gap.

Was it because I had distanced myself from the roots that made me who I am? Constantly shifting between the outside world and my family life?

Or was there something deeper, something my family never told me?

As a third-generation Moluccan, I later learned how our history was shaped. The Dutch colonized the Moluccan islands for spices like cloves and nutmeg. After World War II, things became more complicated. The Dutch promised the Moluccan people their land back—but then Japan invaded what was then called the Dutch East Indies. After the WWII, Indonesia declared independence and fought to reclaim its land. The Moluccans, having already been colonized for 300 years, fought alongside the Dutch against the Indonesian forces.

Under pressure from the international community, the Netherlands eventually gave up the colony. But it wasn’t safe anymore for the Moluccan soldiers and their families. The Dutch government made a promise: come to the Netherlands for seven months, and afterward you’ll return to your own land.

That promise was never kept. Not to this day. The Moluccan families never returned to their land. 

The grief and longing of the first generation ran so deep that no one talked about it. And that’s where my journey begins, trying to claim our history back.

I search for deeply personal narratives, shedding my past like a snake that sheds its skin. Growth means transformation.

One of the ways I search is through Ikat. In Indonesian, ikat means “to bind.” I work with archive materials, printing them onto canvas and using bleach instead of paint. Bleach pulls away the surface,it doesn’t add, it takes away. A kind of whitewashing. I cut up the canvas, reframe it, and invite others to engage with it physically—to stroke the fabric, to be part of the process. This creates a different kind of connection with the work. It opens up new perspectives; on both the practice and the history.

Working with the community, sharing stories, and making space for participation is how I reclaim history. Together, with new friends, we create something that speaks not only of the past, but also to the future.