Museum Panorama Mesdag presented the exhibition on March 29, 2025 Scarlett Hooft Graafland. Mesmerizing: a journey through the enchanting photographic work of this contemporary artist.
Scarlett Hooft Graafland (1973) photographs magical landscapes in the most remote areas of the world. She moves like a nomad from Iceland to Madagascar and from Bolivia to Turkey. In these remote places she works together with the local population and stages colorful and often mysterious performances and installations. It is the first time that her oeuvre is on display in a museum retrospective.
New work
Alongside many highlights from her existing work, the exhibition also featured new work, including Farewell my Freeman Friend, which Hooft Graafland made especially for this exhibition. This image, of a white ball slowly drifting away on a canoe in the Indian Ocean, west of Madagascar, is enriched with embroidery and illuminated by dynamic moving light - a first.
'With this I have really taken a new step in my work. Adding this extra dimension creates even more movement in the work. It is as if a magic wand passes over the work of art', says Hooft Graafland.
Dizzying
The exhibition also featured a recent series of photographs made in Turkey showing people who appear to float. For this series, Hooft Graafland worked with a regular team of circus performers and a trampoline. ‘It seems mundane, a man lying relaxed over the horizon, but when you know that this pose was performed during a dizzyingly difficult jump in the air, you look at it very differently. The image sharpens reality', says Adrienne Quarles van Ufford, head of museum affairs at Museum Panorama Mesdag, and curator of the exhibition.
Power of the landscape
Just like Hendrik Willem Mesdag (1831-1915) did with his iconic Panorama of Scheveningen Hooft Graafland explores the power of the landscape and knows how to capture the grandeur and poetry of vast nature reserves.
With a subtle blend of humor and wonder, she addresses social themes such as climate change, inequality and the position of women, while keeping her work hopeful and inspiring.
Analog and Pure
Scarlett Hooft Graafland photographs analog and does not apply digital processing. 'For me it's about authenticity', says Hooft Graafland, 'and the magical effect it can have. That's why I still photograph with an analog camera. I like that photos capture the natural moment, as a pure registration of a situation’.
Story Collector
A special wall in the exhibition invited visitors to write a message, compose a poem or make a drawing for the person shown on a photo card. The cards brought new stories together on the wall, “collecting” new ideas, thoughts and interpretations. At the same time, the museum used the project to encourage dialogue among visitors. During and after the exhibition, the museum planned to publish a selection of these collected stories.
Film and publication
In a short film shown in the exhibition, Hooft Graafland discussed her working and creative process in her Amsterdam studio. A publication with the same title accompanied the exhibition: Scarlett Hooft Graafland. Mesmerizing. The authors are Adrienne Quarles van Ufford, Scarlett Hooft Graafland and Cathelijne Blok.
About Scarlett Hooft Graafland
Scarlett Hooft Graafland studied at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague and at the Parsons School of Design in New York. She trained as a sculptor and started taking photographs to record her installations.
Scarlett Hooft Graafland's work is included in museum collections of, among others, Fotografiska, Stockholm, Huis Marseille Museum, Amsterdam, Museo Nacional de Arte, La Paz, CAMP Contemporary Art Museum of Palestine, Jerusalem, Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, as well as in the collections of the Amsterdam UMC, the Dutch embassies in Dubai and Brussels, the Dutch Bank, New York Public Library Collection, UBS Zurich, Statoil, Stavanger and FNAC, Paris.
The exhibition Scarlett Hooft Graafland. Mesmerizing opened to the public on March 29, 2025.
