Bildhalle Zürich is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of the renowned Dutch photographer Ilona Langbroek. TERRA INCOGNITA is based on Langbroek's own family history, which is closely linked to her country's colonial past and the history of the Dutch East Indies. It is about the uprootedness and split identity of people who were forced to leave their homeland in a hurry - like Ilona Langbroek's Indonesian grandmother, who was no longer welcome in her own country after Indonesia's independence (1945) due to her marriage to a Dutch soldier.
In her work, the artist places herself in the lives of her grandparents, but also attempts to understand the collective trauma of an entire generation through intensive research and the study of historical images and literature, and to translate it into metaphorical and poetic images. In her staged portraits and still lifes, she works with objects and fabrics that - whether historical or of her own design - connect and visually manifest her grandmother's old and new homeland.
Ilona Langbroek uses the aesthetics of "chiaroscuro", the strong contrasts of light and dark found in Baroque and late Renaissance paintings - especially in Dutch painting of the time. Through light and shadow, the artist creates an atmosphere of transition, symbolic of that in-between world in which people find themselves, leaving familiar terrain behind and never arriving spiritually in a new unknown place - terra incognita. Zelda Cheatle, a renowned British curator of photography, described Ilona Langbroek as the "discovery of the year" in 2021. The artist's success not only in the Netherlands, but also internationally, is certainly also due to the fact that she tells her personal story between the lines. There is room for the viewer to unravel the untold stories behind the pictures and connect them to their own memories.
