Han Nefkens

“All that looking has made one thing clear to me: art is an image of the world, made for the world.”

'Just as life, which we have to live without knowing where it will lead us, making art is an act of faith'.

"It felt completely natural that we would sit together sharing a smoke on the root of a tree in a 12th-century Buddhist temple."

"I imagined the municipal cleaners making the sweeping movements without their brooms, not on the street but in an abandoned garden with a stack of old tires as I had seen in the video."

"The strong impact that these images have on me makes me wonder if my brain can actually tell the difference between what I see on a screen and what I experience in person." 

“The hidden promise of emptiness has instilled a calm in me that I had longed for my whole life, but was never able to achieve.”

"Would having moved north rather than south when I was a young man moulded me into another variant of the person I'm now?"

I'm very much looking forward to how I'll feel in about twenty years' time when I reach the age of Sir John Gielgud, to find out how abundantly young I have grown. 

I always saw my caution not to impose myself on others as a sign of a certain modesty, a natural reticence. But perhaps I’m so cautious because deep down I know that if I don’t put a break on it, I may be boundless in forcing others to see the world the way I and the artists we work with do.

“Of all the images of that trip, why did this one, which I saw for only a split second, have so much impact on me that I wrote about it in such detail? And why was I moved again when I read about it in my journal thirty-three years later?”