‘Maqām’ ‘Boam! Paul van Ostaijen’ Exhibition at the Museum Ephraim Palais, Berlin 2022

Right from the start I was moved by Paul van Ostaijen as a person, how he engaged with the time in which he lived and how he broke with norms. Te fact that he developed his own individual form. Van Ostaijen reconceived the work of art as such – as an independent organism of expression. It is vulnerable and torn like a person, and fragmented like human consciousness. Van Ostaijen let words develop a life of their own: the appearance of the page, the directions in which words move, the size of the letters and even the colours of the text all follow their own rules. Paul van Ostaijen, his story and his approach ultimately gave me the courage to break with the form in my own works of art. Trough this process I gained the sense of having found a new form of expression.

Stadtmuseum Berlin has invited me to the exhibition ‘Boam! Paul van Ostaijen’ to create an artwork inspired by the poet and his time in Berlin after the First World War.