The Archive of John Collier Jr.
in 1940s Colombia
The Colombian by adoption J. J. Seinen, shown by the gallery in 2013 and 2014, is exhibited at Nottingham Contemporary from January 24 to March 8, 2015, as part of The Archive of John Collier Jr. in 1940s Colombia.
American anthropologist and photographer John Collier Jr. studies the relationship between the Colombian people and their land in the 1940s.
José Johann Seinen, born in the Netherlands in 1934, produced, with obsessive care, a unique body of work that could be compared to a personal mythology where archaeology and science fiction are intertwined. It is a spectacular project, one that also poses the question of the game in art. When his parents, suspected of collaborating with the Germans during the Occupation, were imprisoned at the end of the war, José and his five brothers were placed in the custody of their grandparents, who lived in Amsterdam. There, he began drawing tirelessly: exercise books designed like pop-up books filled with robots and – from the start – careful, minuscule cut-outs, small figures of a private theatre[…]