Author Description

"The book 'Open-Ended Visions of Possibilities' speaks to the exploration and experimentation of possibility. What is made possible by artistic practice exploring archival erasure, historical silences, and Black feminist care practices? In dreaming up a multitude of visions and perspectives, kaersenhout allows us to journey with her artistic practice over the past decades. This publication itself marks an important moment in her career by allowing the reader to oscillate between different geographies, works, and materials providing a rich and luscious sense of presence of kaersenhout's practice. Shaped by questions related to place, belonging, and the movement of African diasporas, kaersenhout goes beyond unveiling inequity and power structures, expanding our understanding of racial politics within a broader geopolitical framework. While kaersenhout's art could be read in response to forgotten histories, the cultural and political complexity of her work requires a close examination of how these histories are entangled with Dutch coloniality. Through a visual practice, she unpacks how control, exploitation, domination, violence, and overall destruction continues to shape the ongoing legacies of colonialism and slavery. kaersenhout explores ideas of Dutch mastery alongside public memory and archival erasures. By requiring audiences to be active participants, she asks viewers to experience and feel through collective history and pain. Instead of solely making visible the violent histories and structures that permeate Dutch society, she asks us to reimagine and articulate the lives, experiences, and encounters of those that have long been excluded from mainstream archives."--