Esteban Cabeza de Baca – Life is one drop in limitless oceans….
19.10 – 15.12.2019

The title for Esteban Cabeza de Baca’s solo exhibition takes its inspiration from David Mitchell’s novel Cloud Atlas. A theme in the 2004 sci fi narrative is kindness over greed, selflessness over violence and humanity over betrayal. Mitchell considers how humans normalize brutality, while he also persists against “an ocean” of pessimism.
Taking this text as index into his work, Cabeza de Baca’s art creates temporal ripples in the history of the new and old world. His immersive installation in the Kunstfort’s industrial, late 19th century weaponry storage explores the fluidity of movement; this in contrast against systems inherited out of Europe to America, for centuries harnessing the flow into labor.
Cabeza de Baca, born on the border of the US Mexico border to Mexican and Native American parents, has from a young age felt the brunt of imperial dispossession. Whether it’s through figurative or abstract painting and sculpture this hybrid art practice complicates linear colonial memory in order to envision grander pools of perception.

Inside the fortress: Bogomir Doringer – Dancing Defence: Space, Ritual, Gesture
On and around the island interventions by Miriam Kongstad and Sophie Lee and the third and final chapter of Kunstfort Kasus: Vincent Knopper.

Kunstfort is supported by the Municipality of Haarlemmermeer and the Mondrian Fund.