Between Histories, a Photographer Creates Her Personal

Farren van Wyk has spent her profession inspecting what it means to exist throughout communities—geographically, culturally, and racially. Mixedness is my Mythology (2021–ongoing) is the results of that habitation: an expansive, tender physique of labor that takes mixedness each as material and as a manner of seeing.

Born in South Africa in 1993 to a Dutch father and South African mom, van Wyk moved along with her household to the Netherlands at age six, escaping the oppressive determinations of race and sophistication that apartheid imposed on folks of shade. Developing an curiosity in pictures as an adolescent, she determined to check artwork on the University of the Arts Utrecht, the place she would develop her venture Die lewe is nie reg vir my nie (This shouldn’t be the suitable life for me) (2016–ongoing) as her undergraduate thesis. From the beginning, her photographic curiosity was rooted in her household historical past and heritage. For This shouldn’t be the suitable life for me, van Wyk returned to the neighborhood that she had been born into, photographing residents and interviewing them about their experiences with gang tradition post-apartheid. Based in analysis and dialog, van Wyk’s collaborative, deliberate portraits search to appropriate adverse stereotypes a few residence she by no means knew.

Yet, as her confidence with the medium grew, she realized the documentary ethos of her undergraduate program was slowly changing into misaligned with the way in which she wished to make work. “Gang culture became this theme that I could research and understand what was happening to my community on a macro level,” van Wyk says. “Slowly, as I also grew as a person, I wanted to think about the micro level—an intimate family project. I was growing throughout the years of building a practice and understanding who I was, but senses of belonging were the core threads through everything that I was doing.”

The imposed insularity of the pandemic offered each time and house to make that objective a actuality, and she or he started Mixedness is my Mythology as a method to visualise the approaching collectively of her South African and Dutch identities. The conventional Dutch farm the place she grew up, traditionally understood as a white house, offered the right backdrop for staging portraits of herself, her brothers, and her dad and mom. A specific portrait of her brother, Alexander, standing in entrance of a white brick wall, his hair waved, adorned with a skinny, gold chain and carrying their grandfather’s previous overalls and conventional Dutch clogs, was when issues started to actually click on. “If you have this idea of how a Dutch farm is supposed to look like, this is very much not it. But this is our lived identity, a coming together of these two cultures,” she says.

Working in analogue black and white was a acutely aware selection for van Wyk, knowledgeable by her research for her grasp’s in visible anthropology. In her college analysis, she was taken by the historic, anthropological portraits of individuals of shade she would uncover. “I started seeing myself in these people, in their portraits and in their image, but the stories that were accompanying the archives were so inhumane,” she says. “It was very much not how I want to use the medium, but it was beneficial to understand how photography was used, in order to be able to counter that.”

The emotional register of van Wyk’s portraits fluctuates between tender and celebratory however maintains a decided sense of defiance all through. Props, gestures, and clothes function symbols of cultural cross-pollination—these interferant references convey the true in-betweenness of expertise, pulling not solely from their African and Dutch roots but additionally from world Black diasporic tradition. “I don’t feel represented by this white notion of identity,” she says. “I don’t feel represented by Blackness either. So then, what does it mean to be me, in this in-between? In this gray space?” Mixedness is my Mythology is a proposition, a mirrored image of van Wyk’s questioning, and, finally, an area for therapeutic.

Farren van Wyk is a shortlisted artist for the 2026 Aperture Portfolio Prize, a global competitors that spotlights new expertise in up to date pictures.