Hans Broek

Broek's images of places along the Atlantic, where many of the enslaved worked or were imprisoned prior to being transported, are portrayed by him as sites of evil ­– just as the area surrounding Kamp Amersfoort was once referred to by Armando as 'guilty landscape'. Locations as crime scenes, places on earth where injustice was witnessed without intervention. Vrouwenkerker (Women's Dungeon) depicts such a place: a barred gate in a weathered wall. The work is large, the paint thick and heavy, as though the wall has literally been built with it; and – not insignificantly – the entire canvas is black and white, a symbol of the gap between two segments of the population. Who built those dungeons? Who devised and maintained this system? The questions cannot be avoided when we're faced with this work.