Klik hier voor Nederlands
The colourful paintings of Kiana Girigorie (1997) evolved out of a great deal of research that frequently involved stories and images from her own family history. Some of her earlier paintings reflected on Japanese folklore and her Japanese origins. In One of You, Japanese-Caribbean-Dutch-American in Curaçao (2025), she now examines her Curaçaoan roots.
During a residency in Curaçao, Girigorie studies her family tree. o her great surprise she discovered it had a Jewish branch. She decided to further examine the history of Curaçaoan Jews and, among other things, visited Beth Haim, the island’s oldest Jewish cemetery, with graves affected by environmental pollution caused by the neighbouring Shell refinery. he also delved into the live and work of the writer Frank Martinus Arion, who she is related to. Together with his wife, the writer and anthropologist Trudy Guda, he had been the first to establish schools where Papiamentu was spoken as the first language.
n a large series of paintings, Girigorie shows snapshots from this research, executed in her characteristic, cartoonlike style. For this series, Girigorie found inspiration in Uno di voi, un tedesco in Firenze (One of you, a German in Florence) by the artist Martin Kippenberger. In 1976, Kippenberger moved from Hamburg to Florence and made 84 paintings based on postcards, as well as photographs he made himself, portraying scenes from Florentine life — from portraits of passers-by to meals in restaurants. Girigorie identifies with the sentiment in Kippenberger’s title: in Curaçao she too simultaneously feels like a tourist and one of you.
Text: Sarah van Binsbergen
Translated from Dutch by Marie Louise Schoondergang (The Art of Translation)