Han Nefkens

"I love art that creates an image but at the same time leaves room in my head."

“You can never own a work of art. It belongs to the world, just as the tree in your garden is part of a larger whole.”

“All that looking has made one thing clear to me: art is an image of the world, made for the world.”

'Just as life, which we have to live without knowing where it will lead us, making art is an act of faith'.

"It felt completely natural that we would sit together sharing a smoke on the root of a tree in a 12th-century Buddhist temple."

"I imagined the municipal cleaners making the sweeping movements without their brooms, not on the street but in an abandoned garden with a stack of old tires as I had seen in the video."

"The strong impact that these images have on me makes me wonder if my brain can actually tell the difference between what I see on a screen and what I experience in person." 

“The hidden promise of emptiness has instilled a calm in me that I had longed for my whole life, but was never able to achieve.”

"Would having moved north rather than south when I was a young man moulded me into another variant of the person I'm now?"

I'm very much looking forward to how I'll feel in about twenty years' time when I reach the age of Sir John Gielgud, to find out how abundantly young I have grown. 

I always saw my caution not to impose myself on others as a sign of a certain modesty, a natural reticence. But perhaps I’m so cautious because deep down I know that if I don’t put a break on it, I may be boundless in forcing others to see the world the way I and the artists we work with do.

“Of all the images of that trip, why did this one, which I saw for only a split second, have so much impact on me that I wrote about it in such detail? And why was I moved again when I read about it in my journal thirty-three years later?” 

I wonder if my writing is a way of holding on to experiences by suspending them in time.

Devoid from her art and political activism Frida Kahlo has become a Mexican version of Hello Kitty, no longer the artist whose house opened an important part of Felipe's world to me." 

We both cheered as if we could will it back to life. 

"Free Theater" is an excerpt from ‘ Borrowed Time ’, the book I wrote about my slow recovery of the HIV induced encephalitis I had in 2002.

“What is that ‘something’ that makes decisions for me? Who is that other, deeply hidden I?”- Extract of ‘The H+F Collection, ten years on’ , the book published in 2011 as part of the exhibition at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen that covered my ten years of art activities.

It's hard for me to imagine my brother Victor as a middle-aged man. For me he'll always be a boy of thirty-one, a lost boy, a boy I lost. - Extract from the book  Two Empty Chairs

The strange brother I had never really known had vanished. In his place was a brother with whom I now shared a lot of important things. - Extract from the book "Ties that bind"

The book resonated with me. My notebooks were also full of self-recriminations and guilt over having produced nothing of value. 

When I look at his hand writing in my notebook Joep feels close by, as if he’s still here. 

“For one more minute I want to continue enjoying the soothing sound of his voice, the swishing of his broom and the soft humming of the ceiling fan.”

“I have learned what an obstacle an overly critical voice can be, at times it even paralysed my work. That is why I’m adamant about giving the artists we work with the encouragement I myself may not have received in the past”

I long to physically explore the unknown but I will have to wait at least until my second jab in a couple of weeks.

I felt part of it all, but at the same time there was a sense of distance. It was the same feeling of not quite belonging that I had when growing up in the Netherlands; at the time it was painful but abroad it felt appropriate, comfortable even.