Ellen Rijk

Whose war

Image collections from a search for how and where war enters our lives

The beginning.

Halfway through the previous decade, Tilburg art junkie and low-budget collector Piet van de Ven visited the area around Verdun (France), a landscape full of graves and other monuments from the First World War (1914-1918). Van de Ven was deeply moved. He bought a stack of uncirculated postcards and then invited eight Tilburg artists to create a work of art based on this postcard. One of them is visual artist Ellen Rijk. She got to work on stacks of postcards with great enthusiasm.

Ellen Rijk: “It started in 2015 with a small assignment to make work based on a postcard from the First World War, from the vicinity of Verdun. While searching, collages of postcards, a model and photos emerged. New spatial works followed, a drawing/painting and pictures about my parents' war experiences, my experiences with children in the Gilze and Oisterwijk asylum centres, the war in Ukraine that friends from Kiev ended up in. Not my own, because I am 'from after the war'. So whose war are we actually talking about?”

"Whose War" is the result: a layered exhibition full of images, texts and photography that invites you to pause, to feel and to ask questions. About what war leaves behind - in the landscape, in people, in yourself.

In Art Space Alarm & Museum of All Times, Ellen Rijk shows her work, supplemented with texts by Pietjan Dusee.
The photography is by Ernest Potters, Sahin Sişic and Ellen herself.

The exhibition can be viewed every Saturday from 12 June to 20 September from 1:00 PM to 5:00 PM.
During the opening weekend of the Cycling Festival Land van Cuijk www.fietsfeestlandvancuijk.nl12 & 13 July, and during the Open Monument Day 13 & 14 September opening hours from 10.30 am to 5.00 pm.
These days Ellen Rijk herself is present.

She likes to talk about her work, her quest – and also listens to your story.