At the Bonnefanten Museum, Artists Try to Imagine a Better World

New York Times

01-03-2025

A two-legged unicorn pulls a wooden chariot draped in purple velvet. Nearby, a bejeweled gold dog dressed in a purple and pink jacket plays next to a laundry line, where a film is projected onto a dangling sheet, drying in the wind.
This is the utopian vision created by the Sinti artist Morena Bamberger in an art installation she calls 'Sonnekaskro Djiephen,' or 'a life of gold.' It imagines a world in which her people, who used to be nomadic, could still travel anywhere on wooden wheels.
Bamberger grew up in a tightknit Sinti community living in a small cluster of trailers in the town of Herkenbosch, in the southeastern Netherlands. 'You leave the door open, the coffeepot is always warm,' she said. 'It's like a family of 35 people.'
Today, European laws restrict the Sinti and Roma ethnic groups from continuing their traditional nomadic lifestyle, but Bamberger can still dream of a world where her community can roam free.
Her installation is one of more than 60 artworks featured in the exhibition, 'Dream On,' on display at the Bonnefanten museum in Maastricht through March 30. The exhibition focuses on a recent trend in contemporary art, said a co-curator, Roxy Jongewaard, in which artists try to imagine a better world.
'Over the past five years, we've acquired a lot of artists that are activists, but in a very hopeful way,' she said. 'We've come out of a time when institutional criticism and critique was a very big deal, and now we see that there's more artists who change the conversation to say, 'What if?,' 'Is this possible?' and 'Can we dream up a better future?''
Often, Jongewaard added, these artists use the languages of fairy tales, myths, folklore and songs to explore their utopian dreams, or other forms of expression that are 'very deeply rooted in our collective identity, in the biggest sense of the word,' she said. 'They use them, and they rephrase them, and it becomes a whole new thing, through which we can see the world of the future.'
Celien Govaerts, the other co-curator, said the exhibition's title was a playful reinterpretation of a common expression. 'We often use this phrase, 'Dream on,' kind of like, 'You do you,'' she said. 'It's a way to put people down a little bit, to say they're crazy. We wanted to reclaim this saying, for a positive reason.'
The artworks all come from the museum's permanent collection, and they are by emerging and famous contemporary artists, such as Grayson Perry, Laure Prouvost and Otobong Nkanga.
The oldest artist in the show, Betye Saar, from Los Angeles, is 98, and the youngest artist is Sofiia Dubyna, 24, who moved to the Netherlands to study art from her hometown, Donetsk, Ukraine, before it was seized by Russia in 2022.
Mythical creatures and monsters play an important role in the exhibition's artworks that also address serious topics like decolonization, climate change and feminism. Humor and fantasy are part of the imagery, but the subject is often social change.
A 2019 video work by the Kuwaiti Puerto Rican filmmaker Alia Farid, titled 'At the Time of the Ebb,' for example, captures a longstanding tradition: an annual ritual on Qeshm, a small island off southern Iran, celebrating the arrival of the fishing season. Participants dress up as camels, horses and birds and dance by the sea to honor the gifts of nature and then feast.
'The meaning has changed over time,' Jongewaard explained, 'but you can see how they're trying to adapt this celebration so that it will last another 1,000 years.'
The exhibition presents several intricately detailed textile works in lush colors by the Roma artist Malgorzata Mirga-Tas that were also featured in her solo Bonnefanten show, 'This is not the end of the world.' Among them is a portrait of the leading Roma activist Lalla Weiss, who has spent years raising public awareness about the genocide of Roma and Sinti people during World War II, a part of the Holocaust that has often been overlooked.
Weiss is presented seated in a proud posture on a mountainside, with the material folds of her glittering gold and pink skirt poking out from the canvas.
By invoking such positive referents of activism, and combining them with bright colors and lighthearted imagery, Jongewaard said, contemporary artists in recent years — instead of 'doom-mongering' — have added an element of joy to the way they explore political ideas.
'In a society that is so polarized — people are scared, people feel pressure and negativity all around them — artists are shifting towards a more positive and empathic tone of voice, trying to reach out,' she said. 'In making a dreamlike narrative, you might think it was a form of escapism, but it's not.
'How they process their feelings about their identity is straying further from reality,' she added, 'so they're becoming more fanciful.'
The Sinti artist, Bamberger, said she had long felt that people in the modern era had become too removed from their more adventurous urges, and that she wanted to use art to provoke a return to the wilder side of our imaginations.
'We were once wolves living in a pack in the forest, howling free; we were free beings, autonomous,' she said, employing a fairy-tale metaphor. 'But unfortunately, we became these little Chihuahuas, being fed and petted at home, and so we became very lazy.'
She wants her art to awaken in viewers a sense of vitality and a connection to their deeper purpose of life.
'I ask people to look past this illusion, and to go into themselves, to think about their gifts, and to ask, what does it mean to truly live?' she said. 'How do you know that you're alive right now? How do you know what is real?'