Figure 3. Paul Sietsema

Furthermore, the drawings present in the exhibition constitute references to the artist's work and offer reflections on commercial and colonial expansion in the West. These are joined by the movie Lecture Film (2008), in which the artist examines his work and production processes.

Over the course of his recent output, Sietsema has chosen photographs from the anthropology and ethnography books that he has collected. These images, primarily of lost indigenous and cultural artefacts, colonisations, Western expeditions and industrialisation, form the basis of his work. Sietsema reconstructs these objects in three dimensions as he aims to structure a type of loss caused by their representation. Through the images he builds a world that fluctuates between historical periods, documentation and fantasy, while at the centre of his work lies the matter of representation and its figurative and changeable character - the last escape of the subject towards abstraction, the result of cultural mediation.

Through his images, drawings, and objects - filtered through photography - Sietsema explores the way in which the media affects the viewer's perception of a subject whose identity is built by progressive absence and the resulting loss in the means of representing it.