Since 2019, PARK has been facilitating artists in its summer residencies who refer to the impact of the diaspora in their works, reflecting on Dutch colonial heritage and the relationship between Africa and the West. Monika Dahlberg has been selected as summer guest 2024, she will work at PARK from 18 June to 14 July.
Monika Dahlberg was born in Kericho, Kenya in 1975 and graduated from Minerva Art Academy in Groningen in 2001. She is active within various art forms; she makes sculptures, installations, collages, photographs and texts. Her collages are brightly coloured, funny, sometimes erotic, and often sinister. Her work is expressive, direct and offers a critical perspective, which can also be uncomfortable and confrontational for viewers. Social, aesthetic and political criticism are tools of her working method. Her vital and powerful work is imbued with sensory, erotic energy. Characteristic of her work are the art-historical references she links to her own biography. In the process, she developed her own visual language that she interweaves with how she lives and experiences life.
Her trademark are figures with Mickey-Mouse ears, a reference to a typical African hairstyle but also as a comment on the Disneyfication of contemporary society. For her series 'Gatekeepers', she covers African tourist images with white paint and provides them with the distinctive black ears. Crossing between Western and African visual language, Dahlberg, who grew up in the Netherlands, explores her Kenyan heritage and reactions to it. On her use of social media, she says: "I do a lot on social media to make myself visible as an artist. That way, I connect people with my work and that of others. I post all day long. It really is an ongoing part of my working day."
In response to the slavery past, she wants to make a Gatekeeper, partly inspired by the presence of the statue of Peerke Donders in Wilhelminapark on which PARK is located. And she also makes other work, prompted by the space and materials she finds.
More information will follow.