Hannah Dawn Henderson

Blending elements of experimental documentary with slow cinema, Elieser’s Qaddish emerges as a close reading of the Beth Haim cemetary of Ouderkerk aan de Amstel—the oldest still-functioning Jewish cemetery in the Netherlands. Unlike most burial grounds that typically follows a spatial schema of neatly aligned rows, the Beth Haim is strikingly verdant and more akin to a park than a cemetery, with many of its oldest graves having long become sunken and consumed by vegetation. The highly figurative gravestones, distinctive to the Portuguese- Israelite community, bear the (paradoxical) influence of Catholic iconography, thereby recollecting the migratory path by which the community arrived in the Netherlands four centuries ago. Filmed over eleven months, Elieser’s Qaddish evokes the ritual cadence of qaddish, a prayer often uttered as a gesture of memorialisation—a metric that is both spiritual and temporal. The film's immersive sound design foregrounds the ecology of the site, drawing attention to cycles of growth and decay—the cemetery as a living ecosystem. Within this landscape, the stories of several of the cemetery’s eternal resident are recounted, each marked by histories of migration, displacement, and the struggle to reconstitute identity amid persecution and upheaval. The film centres on the enigmatic figure of Elieser—theoried to have been a formerly enslaved man of African descent. Through archival fragments and speculative reconstruction, a tentative biography emerges, only to dissolve again into uncertainty. Oscillating between presence and absence, knowledge and unknowing, Elieser’s Qaddish meditates on remembrance, historical opacity, and the ethics of representation. It suggests that identity— personal, communal, and historical—remains a site of continual negotiation, shaped as much by what is lost or obscured as by what endures.

Workshop in the form of a walking tour, examining layer socio-political histories and contemporary events in Afrikaanderwijk, Rotterdam. Co-developed with Cihad Caner, programmed by Kunstinstuut Melly (2024 - 2025) and Boijmans op Zuid (2023)

On Paralysis and Punctuation both documents and abstracts my initial recovery from an episode of facial paralysis. Loosely, inspired by performance scores and architectural schematics, the prints draw on my study of ta’amei ha’mikra — a cantillation system in the Jewish tradition for the recital of sacred texts, which I ritualised as form of speech therapy during my recovery. Geometric forms allude to sensations of gradual movement, alongside text notations extracted from a sacred text that describes the world’s creation and a journal tracing the re-growth of my nerves.

Two-part workshop (approximately two hours per session) Developed in collaboration with Yonathan Listik in the framework of the Asterisk* Cell, a sub-project of Collecting Otherwise Presented at Nieuwe Instituut and Shimmer Gallery

metrics of a temporary dwelling unfolds as a meditative survey of the archival depot of Het Nieuwe Instituut (NL), incorporating the collections of the Netherlands Architecture Institute. Amidst the depot’s corners and corridors, four spectres seek out idiosyncrasies — traces of haptic interventions and doubts in the archival process, rupturing the space’s otherwise formal, laconic aura. This search for human presence extends to the depot’s permanent inhabitants: figures depicted in archival materials, housebound in dossiers. Reflections arise regarding the archive’s function as a chronic host, its conceptual relation to architecture, and its role in negotiating and narrating the Netherland’s colonial history.

In 2020, I was invited to participate in Collecting Otherwise, a project developed by Het Nieuwe Instituut within the framework of Rethinking the Collection, an initiative situated under the umbrella of Disclosing Architecture. blueprints, constructing the membrane of a temporary dwelling... draws on my emerging research enquiries whilst exploring the National Collection of Architecture and Urban Planning. An architectural schematic — commonly known as a ‘blueprint’, referring to the cyanotype technique that was formerly used to reproduce such drawings — can be understood as a score for entering and walking through an imagined site, a psycho-sociological terrain. Drawing on the fact that blueprints are — as much ironically as lyrically — prone to fading and are therefore an impermanent medium, blueprints, constructing the membrane of a temporary dwelling... proposes a reimagining of what constitutes an archival site — materialising an ad-hoc architecture that sees story-telling interwoven with hermeneutics, diasporic sensibilities, opacities, and desiccated residuals of rituals. In this space, the archive literally becomes malleable, fragile, foldable and potentially mobile.

In The Archive Who Breathes (2022), a prose-essay is deconstructed as a sprawling landscape that requires the reader to constantly re-orientate the surface upon which the text rests. The essay critically reflects on how bodies can hold intergeneration testaments of the past, such as in the form of psychosomatic manifestations of anxiety — testaments that may go unwitnessed, unacknowledged by formal archives. Printed as a cyanotype—a medium that never remains entirely fixed and can rapidly perish when exposed to light (but can also recover when placed in the dark—the material carrier of the essay echoes the fragility of the subject matter it discusses.

This work belongs to the gesamtkunstwerk ‘Oneirological and Bodily Metrics’ (2020-2021) – an assemblage of interwoven narrative elements, comprising of texts, found objects, drawings, and sculptural components. It is a body of work that developed over the first year as a resident at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, which happened to parallel to the eruption of the Covid-19 pandemic. A set of flowers ‘stand’ erect on the wall, jutting out, floating horizontally. Some recoil back onto themselves, defying gravity. The width of the installation corresponds to my height. The number of flowers corresponds to my age at the time of its creation. Most of the flowers date from the first partial lockdown in The Netherlands in March 2020, during which time I did not travel to my studio in Amsterdam for several weeks. Upon eventually returning, I found that little had changed – in fact, it was only the flowers that indicated that time had elapsed.

Oneirological and Bodily Metrics is an assemblage of interwoven narrative elements, comprising of texts, found objects, drawings, and sculptural components. It is a body of work that developed over the first year as a resident at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, which happened to parallel to the eruption of the Covid-19 pandemic. During this secluded and oftentimes mentally dissociative period, I became increasingly preoccupied with — and, oftentimes, confronted by — that common paradigm of the mind-body duality. It is a duality that appears to belong to wider framework of dichotomous, reductive thought — eg. well versus sick, pure versus diluted, domestic versus foreign. The internalisation of these dichotomies manifests an accumulative yet eerily quiet distress — especially so when the individual in question cannot readily situate themselves in one category or the other. One looks for shelter in these cavities between opposites, dwelling in dissociative grey areas. Each aspect of the assemblage recollects bodily registrations, oftentimes referencing my own bodily dimensions, as well as my attempts to documents parts of my body and the narratives it carries that are not outwardly visible. As such, these registrations do not amount to a quantitative depiction or cataloguing of the body, but rather relay an idiosyncratic, archival abstracting of a body. Residuals of unseen sojourns and excavations — these documents, in their various forms, testify to a body's urgency to locate its points of gravity and subjecthood: the relation between remaining upright and keeping one’s feet on the ground, as much physically as existentially. These works situate fragmented mental experiences — eg. dissociation, escapist daydreaming, mourning — as being integral within, not absent from, the chronology and cartography of one’s corporeality. Trauma is thus understood as not only a ruptured site, but as a liminal space in which new understandings are called to materialise.

Inside the fixed limits of a house, two figures negotiate both themselves and one another’s presence without ever directly coming into contact with one another. They dwell amongst strict lines — a structure that is holding them together but that at the same time instigates both claustrophobia and distance. The verisimilitude of their antics is encroached by an aura of estrangement — tangential thoughts and permeating sounds that annotate and ricochet within this shared, narrow enclosure. Credits Actresses: Karolina Rupp and Ingvild Delia Syntropia Camera: Gijs van der Meer Sound: Nick Thomas

This work belongs to the gesamtkunstwerk ‘Oneirological and Bodily Metrics’ (2020-2021) – an assemblage of interwoven narrative elements, comprising of texts, found objects, drawings, and sculptural components. It is a body of work that developed over the first year as a resident at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, which happened to parallel to the eruption of the Covid-19 pandemic. The protea genus takes it name from Proteus, a god who could change into any form — unfixed, ever fluid. A particular species in the genus — the protea cynaroides — evolved to withstand hostile conditions, specifically wildfires. The flower’s stem is robust and rigid, extending far below ground. When the exposed part of the plant is scorched, dormant buds in its subterranean stem are activated. The sacrum is the joint that is situated just above the tailbone. This clay study is derived from a process of trying to sense and envision my own sacrum. The sacrum is, essentially, the ‘seat’ of the pelvis. Its name derives from the Latin fo rsacred, likely a reference to how it protects the reverse side of the womb and ovaries. Due its density and size, it is usually the last bone to decompose — lingering as the final material trace of a life. When walking to my studio one day, caught up in a tide of anxiety, I saw a large stone at the side of the pavement. I don’t know what possessed me — most likely an urge for distraction and the need to feel grounded — but I decided to carry it with me. Struggling to cradle it in my arms, my spine was tugged into an aggressive curve by this bulk. I realised that it is not a stone at all but some kind of composite of sand and tiny pebbles — elements that, if they were not so tightly compressed together, would surely disintegrate and slip through my fingers.

One edge of the platform is support by a rock, sourced from from a mountain range that I descended in the summer of 2020, shortly before the onset of a period of illness. In the autumn of 2020, I made a series of clay panels, which in total measured my full height and width. On these panels, I made drawings with charcoal — landscapes. I then proceeded to fire these panels through a traditional method — not in an electric kiln, but in a furnace placed on an open fire. However, as to be anticipated, they heated too rapidly and fractured. Other sections broke in my haste to remove them from the fire. What remained were shards and fragments — a pile of irregularities, somehow both complete and broken.

The photographic series Annotations on Afrikaanderwijk recollects a period of site-specific research undertaken in the framework of Wider Perspectives, an exhibition programme presented at Het Gemaal op Zuid (Rotterdam), commissioned by Afrikaanderwijk Coöperatie in collaboration with Furtado Melville. This research culminated in an essay that can be read in the book 'Rotterdam, een postkoloniale stad in beweging' (Published by Boom, 2020) Presented in Het Gemaal op Zuid, the photo series is accompanied by short texts that contextualise and question the depicted imagery. This constellation maps out a chronology of three events that are embedded in the neighbourhood’s urban landscape, pointing towards its past, present and prospective future. These events are: 1) the creation of the neighbourhood and the naming of its streets, 2) the 1972 riots that saw a violent eruption of xenophobia underpinned by economic deprivation, and 3) the forthcoming renovation of Tweebos, an area within the wider neighbourhood which will entail the displacement of current residents per the demolition of social housing.

A nameless figure wanders through an urban landscape, searching for someone or something that resonates as familiar. Her scattered thoughts permeate the material fibre of the neighbourhood — a dense sedimentation of conflicting historical and contemporary narratives: street names honouring a colonial legacy, a monument to migrant workers, the aural ricochet of a nearby construction site alongside protest slogans scrawled on the sidewalk. Personal and social memory become intertwined — both perforated by gaps, elisions, censorship and unrest. Testament was produced in the context of the exhibition series Wider Perspectives at Het Gemaal op Zuid (Rotterdam), commissioned by Afrikaanderwijk Coöperatie in collaboration with Furtado Melville. It was made possible with the generous support of Kunstcentrum Stroom, CBK Rotterdam and the Municipality of Rotterdam. Credits Sound: Erfan Abdi Actress: Arefeh Riahi Subtitling (Dutch): Pelumi Adejumo, Sébastien Smeur

Between a Gaze and a Gesture consists of two synchronised slide-projectors, featuring imagery sourced from the archive of Liberty, a human rights organisation initiated in the 1930s, formally known as the National Council of Civil Liberties. As cropped archival images and texts circulate, a monologue emerges. This monologue seeks to instigate a dialogue with the viewer, whose gaze must navigate the swiftly paced back-and-forth of words and reciprocating glances, gesticulations of protest and being.

Drawing on a body of research compiled during a residency undertaken at Hull History Centre in collaboration with the Wilberforce Institution for the study of Slavery and Emancipation, Being, in a State of Erasure contemplates the socio-political legacies embodied within diasporic identities. In seeking to understand how one may locate a sense of origin when belonging to diaspora formed by multiple diasporas, as in the case of the Jamaican diaspora, I found myself confronted with the urgency to address and examine the politicisation of personhood and movement. By bringing the autobiographical into dialogue with the archival, the publication sheds visibility on the prevalent commentaries that circulated Commonwealth migration to the UK during the mid-20th Century, a political history to which my own family history is intertwined. During the residency I worked predominately with of the archive Liberty, formally known as the National Council of Civil Liberties, a human rights organisation initiated in the 1930s. Over the course of four weeks I surveyed hundreds of documents, from letters to government reports to newspapers, each reflecting another facet of the many complex narratives and perspectives defining this era. This proved to be as much an investigation into the history of British colonialism as it was research into what it means in the current day to belong to a diaspora formulated by those colonial practices, whereby one’s identity is seemingly both fragmented and yet demanding of definition.

In Search of an Axis meditates on the politicisation of the body and movement, departing from the notion that the body is both a vessel in which personal experienced are compiled yet simultaneously a territory upon which political power-plays are exerted. Produced in collaboration with dancer and choreographer Malik Nashad Sharpe and dancer Fazle Shairmahomed, the essay features movement performances staged at various locations along Hull’s docklands. The gestural qualities of these performances takes influence from the visual material gathered during a period of research in Hull, where I was engaged predominately with the archive of Liberty.