World Fine Art Professionals and their Key-Pieces, 520 – Scarlett Hooft Graafland

World Fine Art Professionals and their Key-Pieces, 520 – Scarlett Hooft Graafland

Scarlett Hooft Graafland has a surrealistic view of life when you look at her photos. The influence of Magritte, for example, is clear: tranquil scenes in which reality appears to be more absurd than fantasy. She confirms this when she shows us around the exhibition ‘Mesmerizing’ in Museum Panorama Mesdag. The bowler hats in her Bolivian photos could be seen as a kind of tribute to the bowler hats in Magritte’s work, she says.

Scarlett Hooft Graafland is trained as a sculptor and thinks in forms. She initially only took snapshots to record her installations. Then the photos became the artwork in themselves.

The interaction between man and landscape

She went to Iceland, Bolivia, the Arctic in Northern Canada, Island, Bolivia, Norway, India, Madagascar, Yemen, Vanuatu, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey. She went to some countries, such as Bolivia, several times.

The whole world is her work area: she moves across it like a nomad. “Often in very remote places I create and photograph spatial performances and installations, in which interaction is central: between man and landscape, between culture and nature. I am concerned with authenticity, reality itself can be enchanting to me.”

The power of the idea

In the performances and installations she presents meaningful aspects of the local culture in the context of their natural environment, the untamable and ever-changing surrounding nature. “I am often helped in this by the local population and by people I meet along the way; they usually do this purely through the power of the idea. I then capture the installations and performances by photographing them.”

She is interested in the authenticity and the enchanting effect that can emanate from it. “That is why I still photograph with an analogue camera. I like it when photos capture the natural moment, as a pure registration of a situation. That does slow things down, but I think it is important to hold on to this traditional and ‘journalistic’ way of photographing in our digitally-created world.”

The horizon is an important element for her that connects her to the work of Hendrik Willem Mesdag, the founder of Museum Panorama Mesdag. “The horizon refers to what we cannot see but what is there, to the unknown and to adventure. The horizon fades towards the ends of our field of vision and shows the finiteness of our knowledge and of our existence.”

Explanation of the photos

Pink Lady, 2015. Scarlett Hooft Graafland lets two bowler hats float, as a companion to a woman in pink on an immense salt flat. “Quechua women have been wearing these hard felt hats since they were introduced to Bolivia by British railway workers in the 1920s. The bowler hats have their own history, but their surreal sharp shadows evoke mysterious associations.”

Kiss, (2014 – 2022). In Yemen, where women are forbidden from showing their bodies and faces in public, two women from the Almahrah tribe exchange a traditional nose kiss. “The women themselves came up with this idea. Behind them, two elongated light green balloons touch each other, like a repetition of shapes.”

Airplane, 2024. The infinite horizon plays a central role in the work of Hooft Graafland, as part of the boundless nature. This woman in her fluttering dress floats with her arms outstretched above an airplane through the Turkish airspace.

Polar Bear, 2007. Wrapped in a polar bear fur, this woman braves a temperature of -25 °C. Frivolously, she even sticks out a bare leg. Several ideas come together here, as they often do with Scarlett Hooft Graafland. “I spent a long time with the Inuit on the Canadian Arctic Circle and experienced the suffering that the weakening of the ice due to climate change causes for humans and animals. This is simultaneously a self-portrait – in which the tip of my nose froze – and a statement about deteriorating living conditions.”

Lemonade Igloo, 2007. A generation gap in images: the Inuit leaning against the newly built igloo in his traditional wolf outfit is one of the last to master the craft of making an ice hut. “The youth sit behind the computer and drink lemonade. The older generation in the village of Igloolik is able to survive in the Arctic and holds on to a more traditional way of life. Together with this man, Nathan Qamaniq, I built the igloo from blocks of frozen lemonade.”

Farewell my Freeman Friend, (2013 – 2025). A white ball slowly drifts away on a canoe in the Indian Ocean, west of Madagascar, where the sun has already set. “An ode to Jacqueline Hassink (1966 – 2018), my late art companion and best friend.” She created this work especially for this exhibition. This image is enriched with embroidery and is illuminated by dynamically moving light – a first. ‘I have really taken a new step in my work with this. By adding this extra dimension, even more movement is created in the work. It is as if a magic wand is waving over the artwork’, she says.

Sweating Sweethearts 2, 2004. These Aymara women from the Bolivian Andes were only allowed to participate in photo shoots with their husbands’ explicit permission. As a silent protest against the macho culture, Scarlett Hooft Graafland placed them on a pedestal: salt mountains, raked together by the same men during the salt extraction. The women’s sweet cotton candy refers to the way they are addressed in that region: sweethearts. Posing breaks the routine: the women enjoyed it and could not suppress a smile.

Mothers of the Forest, 2012, Scarlett Hooft Graafland asked ten mothers to lie down with their legs up against the trunk of this baobab. “I was inspired by the famous children’s book Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, in which the baobab is described as ‘an upside-down tree’. The story is popular in Madagascar where they call this tree Renala, ‘mother of the forest’.

About the artist

Scarlett Hooft Graafland (Maarn, 1973) graduated from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague in 1999, after which she obtained her Masters in Sculpture at the Parsons School of Design in New York. In recent years she has had great success with her photographic work. Recent solo exhibitions include those at the Landskrona Museum in Landskrona, Sweden, the Museum of Photography in Seoul, South Korea, the MOCA Museum in Lima, Peru, the Museo Nacional de Arte in La Paz, Bolivia, the MoCCA Museum in Toronto, Canada and Huis Marseille in Amsterdam.

Film and publication

In a short film, shown in the exhibition, Hooft Graafland talks about her work and production process in her Amsterdam studio. The exhibition is accompanied by the publication Scarlett Hooft Graafland. Mesmerizing. The authors are Adrienne Quarles van Ufford, Scarlett Hooft Graafland and Cathelijne Blok. Publisher Waanders. Price 25 euros.

Images

1)Pink Lady, 2015, 2) Kiss (2014 – 2022), 3) Airplane, 2024, 4) Polar Bear, 2007, 5) Lemonade Igloo, 2007, 6) Farewell my Freeman Friend, (2013 – 2025), 7) Sweating Sweethearts 2, 2004, 8) Mothers of the Forest, 2012, 9) Scarlett Hooft Graafland, Working in Salar desert ©Gaston Ugalde.

From March 29, 2025 to August 31, 2025.

https://panorama-mesdag.nl/
https://www.scarletthooftgraafland.nl/shg/site/news/item/379
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https://inzaken.eu/2025/03/28/scarlett-hooft-graafland-de-hele-wereld-is-mijn-werkterrein/