Text: Efrat Shir
The Bird Room in Museum Van Loon is covered with animals and exotic birds, in a toile de jouy design.
On the walls of this room – a room in a private house whose history is decisively linked to the
commerce and colonial exploitation of the Dutch Golden Age – Porat installs her own version of
exotica, but hers reflects the view of a foreign artist in the exotic lands of Amsterdam’s archives.
Porat’s installation stems from a chance encounter with an ordinary-looking box full of bird-parts in
the Van Loon family’s private archive. The heads and feathers in the box were of Birds-of-Paradise, the
birds whose beauty and mystical origin turned the ir dead bodies and plumage into a sought-after
symbolic and ornamental commodity in European collections starting in the 16 th century, a trade
appropriated by the Dutch. The display of Birds-of-Paradise, whether in private collections or as a
public fashion artefact, was meant to stir awe. And indeed, the sense of surprise and curiosity led
Porat on a petite journey into their history as exotica in the city’s archives; they became her visual
entry point into this work.
Juxtaposing, manipulating and layering images of plumes and ornithological-like images, portraits and
scientific tools, Porat sets out on an imaginary voyage which alters and confuses visual and historical
narratives. By dotting Van Loon’s family photos with her own literal words, and by creating her own
private collection of exotic curiosities inside the family’s historic residency, she questions how
historical and personal narratives can exist in parallel, visually. Early collections of exotica should be
understood as both “space and narrative”, the historian Daniela Bleichmar argues; where in this
“collection”, Porat seems to ask, does one bird end and another begins?
With this installation Porat continues her artistic practice of recent years of collecting, manipulating
and re-contextualising archival images in an attempt to interweave historical and personal narratives,
and in so doing to contemplate photography’s power to generate immediate emotion and
identification.
This time, the Sophiornithidae – the extinct “wisdom birds” – are at her side.
This exhibition was made possible thanks to the support of Museum Van Loon, Castrum Peregrini, Oude Kerk, Reinwardt
Academy, 3Package Deal, AFK, Bureau Broedplaatsen