Dr. Maarten K. van der Heijden
Artist Website: https://joma-amsterdam.nl
About the Artist
Dr. Maarten van der Heijden (1947) had previous careers in Baroque Music as a Violone / Double Bass player in orchestras with Ton Koopmanand others, and as an Educational and Child Psychologist and University Teacher. From 2005 till 2010 he studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Art Academy Amsterdam. From 2015 on he is working on the JOMA: the Jewish SecOnd generation art & family Museum Amsterdam. In 2017 his artworks were shown at the Jerusalem Biennale for Contemporary Jewish Art. In May 2021 he presented a paper in the symposium on Jewish Second-Generation Artists of the University of Leicester (UK).
The JOMA: the Jewish SecOnd generation art & family Museum Amsterdam
Statement About Work
The Jewish secOnd generation art & family Museum Amsterdam (JOMA) is an artwork in progress, beautifully located in the 100 m2 basement of my own house at the Brouwersgracht in the heart of the monumental seventeenth century center of Amsterdam. In the JOMA, I combine my visual art with the eight family stories I have been telling in secondary schools since 2015, in collaboration with Camp Westerbork Memorial Centre. The JOMA is a museum, an ego document, an installation as well as a “Gesamtkunstwerk”. There is also a library with more than 370 books, a museum garden and a museum café.
About he artworks. The series Tissues and Grotesques are kaleidoscopic digital photomontages consisting of details from the photographs the allied forces took in 1945 at the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps. In the series Stations of the Cross - Ecce Homo I juxtaposed images of the Shoah and details of Renaissance paintings. In the photocollages 141 BOXES I made use of autobiographical family photographs.
The JOMA raises many questions among the visitors. Historical questions about the industrial mass murder of the Shoah. But also very personal, ethical, artistic as well as religious questions. I consider myself as an inseparable part of the JOMA and I will be present in the JOMA during visits. The visitors can ask me anything they want and I try to answer them as honestly as possible. In this sense the JOMA is also a kind of ‘relational art’ or ‘art of encounter’.
More about the artist: https://www.erev-rav.com/archives/english/postmemory-censored-art-maarten-van-der-heijden
