teja van hoften

CONSTELLATIONS AND NETWORKS - Eva Langerak

The sunlight reflected on the concrete floor of the gallery space calls up the illusion of a gently rippling surface of water when I enter the exhibition together with teja for the first time. The light moves across the floor like an invisible current, a fleeting presence that immediately lends the space a certain lightness. Remarkable, because the exhibition encompasses no less than fifty years of artistic practice. And yet it is not the scale of that oeuvre that presents itself first, but a sense of balance. My gaze wanders along the works. Half a century of looking, thinking, making... Half a century in which experiences, observations and thoughts found their way into matter, form and image. How do you hold such a span of time in a single exhibition?

That I See Gallery begins its existence precisely with a retrospective gives the space a particular significance. It is not a neutral exhibition venue, but a place that invites slowing down. Where the daily practice of the land was once worked at, there is now room for attention, imagination and contemplation. That I, as a curator also from Zeeland, may accompany the opening of this new place with words feels like a privilege.

Together with Ana Pelgröm and teja van hoften, I stand in the sun-drenched space. The light keeps moving across the floor like water, while the works seem to drift in a slow rhythm of reflections and memories. "Current, water," teja says, "is an important theme in my work."

Current. It is a word that suggests movement and connection at the same time. Water seeking its way through a landscape. Electricity running through cables. Thoughts making their way through the brain. Time passing. A current has no fixed point of origin. It arises from what came before and always moves on. To point to a beginning in this exhibition therefore proves impossible. Every look at one work is immediately followed by another work that presents itself. As if the exhibition does not consist of separate objects, but of a network of associations. A constellation.

We begin at a wall where porcelain figures seem to move through the space. Whether they are falling, flying, floating or diving, teja leaves open with a smile. I think of Icarus, of the old human desire to break free from gravity. But these figures do not seem driven by ambition or hubris. They seem weightless, stripped of everything that so often keeps people captive. For a moment I would like to move along with them. We wind our way further through the exhibition. Past water works, branches, threads and deltas. Past compositions of micro-organisms that spread across the surface like galaxies. "They are everywhere," teja says. "In the air, in the oceans, on our skin." She is speaking of the micro-organisms she studied at Micropia, the museum next to Artis devoted to the very smallest animals, the single-celled organisms. Fascinatingly, she also used her own body to arrive at those unicellular forms.

In a wall cabinet stand the books she has made so far. As we leaf through them, structures appear again. "The body is a landscape," teja says.

At that moment my eye falls on one of her embroidered works. Networks of lines, organisms, cells and connections. It is as though her work is continually searching for the moments when the distinction between body and world begins to blur.

When teja speaks of current, it is soon no longer only about water. Current also points to the networks that shape our existence. The visible and invisible structures within which we live. Roads, rivers, electricity cables, data networks, root systems, nerve pathways. Each day we move through systems larger than ourselves. More than that: we exist thanks to those systems.

As I look at her work, I think of the metro networks of Paris and New York. Of the coloured lines that branch beneath the city, cross one another and come together again. Maps that at first glance appear rational, but on closer inspection possess something strikingly organic. Their structure recalls river deltas, fungal threads, the connections between neurons in our brain.

Perhaps that is why networks fascinate us so. Because we recognise them everywhere. In trees, in cloud formations, in rivers, in traffic flows, in the branching of lungs and blood vessels. As if the world repeatedly draws itself according to comparable principles. The philosopher Gilles Deleuze once described such structures as a rhizome: a network without a centre, without hierarchy, without a clear beginning or end. A structure in which everything can become connected with everything else.

The most beautiful examples of this may well be found in our own bodies. During a conversation, teja tells me about a medical examination she had to undergo years ago. While a camera moved through her body, she watched along on a screen. Where a doctor saw a diagnostic instrument, teja saw a landscape. She describes how the pink folds of her intestinal wall reminded her of an artichoke. Layer upon layer, a world unfolded that was at once strange and familiar. An inner world she had carried with her all her life, but had never seen before. Afterwards she asked whether she might receive a copy of the images. The doctor responded with surprise. Why would anyone want to keep images of their own intestines? But that reaction is telling precisely because of its surprise. We live our entire lives in a body we scarcely know. We see our hands, our face, our skin. But the greater part of ourselves remains hidden. The body is perhaps the most intimate, and at the same time the most unknown, landscape we possess. It touches on a fundamental human paradox. We are constantly fascinated by ourselves, while at the same time we are afraid of what is inside. Of illness, decay, vulnerability. Ultimately, too, of death.

Where such images are often used to detect abnormalities, teja uses them to make kinships visible. To show how the patterns of the body resonate with those of nature. How an intestinal wall can resemble a flower. How a nervous system is related to a river delta. How the same forms keep repeating themselves across countless scales.

We move to the ceramic works on the floor. Large, round forms that anchor the space. On the polished concrete they seem to bob like buoys on a calm surface of water: beacons offering something to hold on to amid the continuous movement that flows through the exhibition.

Then we arrive at the final work. My eye had already been drawn to it earlier. A ceramic form, akin to a pit or seed core, stands in dialogue with an openwork bronze structure. Two forms that seem to complement one another without fully coinciding. Body and soul.

It feels like a fitting endpoint, or perhaps better said: a new point of departure. Throughout the exhibition we have moved along currents of water, networks, micro-organisms, landscapes of skin and intestines, structures that repeat themselves from the smallest to the largest scale. Here the attention shifts toward something less easily pinned down. Toward that which withdraws from the eye, yet can nevertheless be sensed. The ceramic form recalls a pit in which the promise of new life lies enclosed. A structure that can unfold, branch out and transform. But a pit can also dry out, shrivel, disappear. In that too lies a truth about existence. Growth and decay, emergence and disappearance are not opposites, but part of the same cycle.

Perhaps this is what teja's work makes visible again and again: that everything is connected with everything else. That the patterns we recognise in waterways, root systems, nerve pathways and galaxies are also present within ourselves. That body and mind, human being and nature, inner world and outer world are not strictly separated dk of forms, omains, but different manifestations of the same underlying structure.

Just as water seeks its way through a landscape, so teja's oeuvre moves through a networmemories and experiences. Not linearly, but branching; not aimed at an endpoint, but at the making of new connections. What this exhibition ultimately makes visible, then, is not a completed oeuvre that can be summarised, but a continuing movement of looking, wondering, transforming and connecting. A practice that reminds us that, however separate we may sometimes imagine ourselves to be, we are always part of the same current.