While Searching, Behavior Changed / Everything Ends Up on the Beach / Romanticizing Home – Stolen Days, Stolen Ours (2024)

How do you visualize a silenced history? Inspired by Indonesian and Moluccan ikat weaving techniques, Nazif Lopulissa presents three works based on the following photographs: the 1977 train hijacking at De Punt, a beach in the Moluccas, and the garden of Lopulissa’s grandfather on the Moluccan islands. The results are collectively woven textiles that hover between two- and three-dimensionality, between appearance and disappearance. Woven with reflective foil, they draw the viewer into both the work and the history it refers to. Through erasing, bleaching, and rearranging, Lopulissa shows how images – like memories – continuously dissolve and take shape again. He reveals that, just as the sea eventually brings everything ashore, a censored truth will inevitably come to surface: a visual attempt to grasp what remained unspoken.

Clove ship

Nazif Lopulissa’s clove ship is a small yet charged souvenir from the personal collection of the artist. The ship is made entirely of dried cloves, strung together like beads. Models of this fluyt – the type of vessel partially visible behind Lopulissa’s work – were crafted by local artisans in the Moluccas for the foreign market. It is a direct reminder of the historical clove trade from the Moluccas to the Netherlands via the Dutch East India Company (VOC). The fluyt is a seventeenth-century, three-masted sailing ship designed to transport large cargoes of goods, including cloves and nutmeg.