Museumweek: Garden of Scars tours
1 April 2023
11:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.
A series of tours through Ibrahim Mahama's Garden of Scars.
From Saturday 1 to 7 Friday April, the 9th Museum Week will take place. On Saturday 1 and Sunday 2 April, our tour guides will take you through Ibrahim Mahama's installation Garden of Scars. They will talk about his work from a personal perspective.
Participation
Pre-registration is not necessary. Participation is free with a valid Oude Kerk admission ticket.
Start of guided tour
Every hour on Saturday between 11 am until 4 pm. Tours last approximately 25 minutes.
About Ibrahim Mahama's Garden of Scars
In recent years, Ibrahim Mahama has become an internationally respected artist. Especially for the Oude Kerk, Mahama developed a room-filling installation. This is Mahama's first solo exhibition in the Netherlands. His work explores a global history of trade routes, migration flows and (post)colonialism.
The tour guides speak
Rik Bakker: 'Ibrahim Mahama's installation not only confronts us with an uncomfortable past, but his Garden of Scars, is also about 'scarrification' in the present such as neo-colonial practices of exploitation and extraction that help hinder solutions to global ecological crises.'
Gerard van Vuuren: 'Mahama's stone garden is alive, every morning when I walk into the church at its opening I think a crack has widened here, a twig growing out of the concrete there. Scars, marks, connections and contradictions are obscured, or rather sharpened by the ever-changing light in the church.'
Belle van Bergeijk: 'When I walk through the Oude Kerk, I always direct my gaze upwards. The ceiling paintings let me escape to another world. Mahama's Garden of Scars made me focus more on the floor. There is a history buried under the tombstones, which comes to the surface through Mahama's sculptures. The light in the church now shines on the shared world that has become visible.'
