Sara Blokland

A Human Copy of Violence is a  work in progress  in which Sara Blokland focuses on life-size museum figures that represent colonial histories. Removed from their usual display contexts, these figures are photographed and filmed 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, emphasizing that they are  carefully shaped interpretations. In this state, they evoke a sense of unease: familiar in scale and form, but marked by distance and artificiality. Blokland’s images focus on this tension. They become ambiguous both subjects and objects, both representations and material things. The act of display is interrupted, and with it, the certainty of what these figures are meant to convey. A Human Copy of Violence engages with how images and objects carry histories within them. 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.