What Knots Knot Knots confronts a past that never left. The colonial history of the North of the Netherlands shapes life today, but it is rarely told together.
In the seventeenth century, Frisian universities and mapmakers worked for the VOC and the WIC, and ships from Groningen sailed to Ghana to trade enslaved people. Jan Albert Sichterman built a fortune as a VOC director for Bengal and erected a grand household on the Ossenmarkt of which the Groninger Museum have multiple pieces in their collection In the twentieth century, Moluccan soldiers of the Royal Dutch East Indies Army (KNIL) and their families arrived at the former camp Westerbork; labour migrants came to Friesland to work the land and factories. And these histories are still here.
But archives do not keep everything. Some stories fade; others were never recorded at all. Once gone, they are gone. Eight artists refuse to let that happen. They press the archives with harder questions: who decides what is kept and what is erased? Drawing on local collections and conversations across the region, they made photography, video and installations. Each work is rooted in a specific place and community, and forces long-hidden histories into the open.
The title is derived from a quote by Donna Haraway:
“It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.”
How you tie things decides which story can be told.
It refuses one grand narrative, setting local stories from several centuries side by side to show how tightly they are bound. It is an urgent first step in a lasting collaboration initiated by Noorderlicht, across partners in Groningen, Drenthe and Friesland to keep this past in view before it slips out of reach.
Friesland
In VHDG, Cihad Caner, and Thato Toeba present new work that rubs up against the archival absences and abstractions in the maritime histories of Friesland, while Jori(k) A. Galama presents a film that was recently acquired by the Fries Museum. They explore how images, stories and histories that connect the Frisian context and its archives to wider questions of migration, language and belonging. Together, the three present a Frisian edition in which archives appear not as neutral records but as active systems that decide what is seen and what is left unsaid.
Cihad Caner
Cihad Caner is a visual artist based in Rotterdam. His research-driven practice examines the politics of image-making through video, photography, music, motion capture and CGI, with attention to representation, language, marginalisation and alterity. A resident at the Rijksakademie (2021–2023), he has exhibited at Kunstinstituut Melly, EYE Filmmuseum, Akademie der Künste Berlin and İstanbul Modern.
Jori(k) A. Galama
Jori(k) A. Galama is a filmmaker, writer and visual artist. After a propaedeutic year in philosophy at the University of Amsterdam, they graduated from the Image and Language department at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and from the Netherlands Film Academy. Their work revolves around embodiment, queer ecology and the relationship between the individual and closed communities.
Thato Toeba
Thato Toeba is an artist, legal scholar and social science researcher working between Maseru (Lesotho) and Amsterdam. Through mixed-media photomontage and assemblage, they examine how Black life is represented and manipulated in historical and contemporary archives. Toeba was a resident at the Rijksakademie (2023–2025) and received the FNB Art Prize in 2025; their work is held in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum.
