Caja Boogers’s Fragments of Unspoken Memories

Hanging in my father’s study is a painting by my grandfather of a seemingly idyllic Sri Lankan landscape. It’s an artefact from his time stationed there during World War II, when it was still referred to as Ceylon. After fleeing the Netherlands, he was dispatched to the Dutch East Indies, but ended up in Ceylon after Japan invaded. One of several paintings from that period, all of which were stored in the basement during his lifetime – out of sight, out of mind – it serves as a testament to a life he rarely spoke about. This sense of unspoken memories stored in fragments resonates with Caja Boogers’s new exhibition, ‘As Far as I Know’, at Gerhard Hofland Gallery.

Boogers, who is only 23, is rising quickly in the Dutch art scene. His first solo show at the gallery presents a series of 92 paintings, ‘Untitled (Iterations)’ (2024). They’re based on six photographs – two from a family album and four from the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies – all taken in the former Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). It’s a place Boogers knows mostly through the memories his grandparents shared: brief anecdotes coaxed from a general reticence to discuss their past. Like my grandfather’s paintings, these works speak to trauma and memory, though from vastly different perspectives. As the Netherlands continues to reckon with its violent colonial legacy, Boogers’s show feels timely and urgent.

Visually, the installation is overwhelming: while each painting is identical in size and arranged in a strict grid, every canvas is rendered in a unique shade. The muted and complementary palette of grey, green, brown, yellow and orange suggests colours fading into oblivion, while Boogers’s signature use of acrylic paste creates a flattened surface, adding to the works’ subtle appeal.

Rather than offering a complete narrative, these images offer details from the source photographs that are rich with possible interpretations, inviting viewers to piece together the backstory. The works reference stereotypes, clichés and cultural markers tied to tempo doeloe (loosely translates to ‘the good old days’), a controversial Indo-Dutch term evoking both a period and a sentiment. Referring to the years between 1870, when the disastrously extractive Dutch cultivation system imposed on indigenous farmers in Indonesia was abolished, and the onset of World War I in 1914, the expression reflects the nostalgic view many colonial families and their descendants held after returning to the Netherlands, recalling the power and prestige they had once enjoyed.

The differently cropped close-ups of massaging hands might be seen as expressing a sense of indigeneity through a traditional technique of massage performed by a tukang pijit (masseur), but could also be interpreted as referencing servitude. The images of a man in uniform – Boogers’s great-grandfather, a police commissioner – suggest a position of standing and authority but also evoke the subjectivization and violence associated with The Royal Netherlands East Indies Army (KNIL), which consisted of both Indigenous people and white Europeans, that fought colonial wars and suppressed uprisings. Boogers’s work gestures enticingly toward such unspoken histories through fragmented imagery that engages us with intimate moments of memory and loss.

There’s something sacred in the totality of this installation. Rupturing the composition in order to sell the works, scattering them across collections, would feel like fracturing memory itself. Boogers’s future is undoubtedly bright, but I can’t help questioning the rush to commodify these parts when they’ve only just had the chance to coalesce into a whole. Yet, thinking again of my grandfather’s basement, where his paintings remained unseen for decades, I find myself wondering whether some collections are, in fact, meant to be dispersed, reminding us of the evanescence of the past and the transience of memory.

Caja Booger’s ‘As Far as I Know’ is at Galerie Gerhard Hofland, Amsterdam, until 12 October 

^{Main image: Caja Boogers, from the series ‘Untitled (Iterations)’ (detail), 2023–24, oil and acrylic paste on linen, 65 × 50 cm. Courtesy: the artist and Galerie Gerhard Hofland, Amsterdam; photograph: Jonathan de Waart}