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Eva Gjaltema

NETHERLANDS

Eva Gjaltema (1979) is a Dutch visual artist who has been living in Berlin since 2012. She discovered the potential of photography for understanding the relationship with herself and her environment around 2000. Photography always functioned as a tool for her to reveal unconscious thoughts, feelings and memories.

She engages with various contemporary themes, focusing on the concepts of identity, relationships, and memory. Specific themes include: female identity, motherhood, power structures within relationships, family and society. So far, she has primarily worked with the medium of photography, collage, and mixed media in her projects, with the photobook also playing an important role.

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The Hunting Game

The images of the main reference material from which I mainly created the collages, are from a vintage book from the 50s around hunting in the former Czechoslovakia . Czechoslovakia in the 50’s had over 100,000 organized hunters who hunted for love and as a sport. Mainly white men and some women are depicted in the book, where‚ normal citizens’ are hunting different game as a way to ‚contribute to the wealth of the beautiful country. Game hunting is actually a kind of harvest in hunting terms, as the fruits of honest and systematic game management are harvested here. In hunting, we understand hunting to mean any activity by which the hunter takes possession of game.

This book symbolizes for me how the human relationship with animals/ nature and generally within society everything is centered around power. This drama of inequality and underlying power structures seems to be the central theme within the work, where I combined the main reference material with other vintage materials with images from non-western women and children.

The depicted women, children and animals that seem to be trapped inside the images, want to break free with a fierce spirit. Society is a raw and hard place, where survival of the fittest is still the underlying dogma. This still makes me angry. How can 'soft powers' strike back or resist and become ‚liberated’ from dominated powers?

I would like to challenge dominant narratives, showcase resilience, and inspire viewers to rethink the values of empathy, cooperation, and inner strength in the context of survival and societal structures.

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Isabel Miquel Arques