Sara Blokland

A Human Copy of Violence Sara Blokland focuses on life-size museum figures used to communicate colonial  and indigenous societies and sculpted through racist perspectives and examples. Far away from their orginal  display contexts these figures  ‘live in the attics and storage spaces with no specific use. Blokland  photographed and filmed them  in moments of handling, storage, or restoration. Placed on tables or positioned in transitional spaces, they appear dislocated, no longer fixed within a narrative, but suspended between object and representation. The figures resemble human bodies, yet their constructed nature remains visible. Their surfaces, gestures, and expressions reveal the process of their making. In this state, they evoke a  evenmore sense of unease: familiar in scale and form, but marked by distance and artificiality. Blokland’s  research  focus on this tension. a tension between protocol  and  a sense of aliveness through the human figure . They become ambiguous, both subjects and objects, both representations and material things.  A Human Copy of Violence engages with how these figures carry histories  of voilence within them and how violence continues through care, neglect and spaces of transition . Rather than illustrating a fixed story, the work draws attention to the conditions under which these representations exist, and how meaning is embedded in their form, their making, and their continued circulation.