Wiosna van Bon: Family Stranger
2024. Aug. 07. - 2024. Sep. 15.
An important mission of MODEM Project Space is to present young international artists to the Debrecen audience.
The first step in this endeavour is the solo exhibition Family Stranger by Dutch photographer Wiosna van Bon. This photo series deals with families in which one of the members has been incarcerated. With lyrical ellipticism, the artist abstracts the psychological processes that family members and prisoners go through during their time in prison. The pictures were taken in prison and in or in the immediate surroundings of family members’ homes. These are complemented by various objects, mostly toys, which, in most cases, refer to the parent-child relationship and the carefree world outside, as a counterpoint to the harshness of prison. As a consequence of this theme, motifs of silence, confinement and surveillance dominate the images, but the emergence of plants also suggests the hope of a new beginning.
One of the main aims of the series is to show that the family of the person serving a prison sentence is also a ‘prisoner’: family members experience a kind of imprisonment in their daily lives. The families who suffer this continue to live their lives in shame, while the offender is cut off from the real world and placed in a system of supervision and discipline.
The photograph shows an artificially made, perhaps wooden trail in a forest, overgrown here and there with moss. Judging from the missing canopy of the trees, it could be autumn, a topos of passing. Taken out of the context of the exhibition, the work might remind us of the setting of a sinister Grimm’s fairy tale, but in any case, it has a depressing, dismal atmosphere. At the same time, if we interpret the spectacle as an integral part of the series, and try to put ourselves in the position of a man newly released from prison, who has just been reunited with his family, it could also symbolise the possibility of a new beginning. A new path in life, with many difficulties ahead, no end in sight, but nature and the forest holding the promise of a freedom not experienced for a long time.