Photographs by Satijn Panyigay of empty museum added to Boijmans’ collection

Invitation to slow down

Eight photographs by Satijn Panyigay (1988, Nijmegen) are added to the museum’s collection and will be housed in the photography storage compartment. The images come from two series that Panyigay made in the empty museum building, showing the deserted galleries without art or visitors. Panyigay makes photographic work that invite the viewer to slow down.

She documented the building’s interior shortly after its closure, resulting in the series Twilight Zone (2020), which was exhibited at Art Rotterdam in 2021. On invitation of the museum Panyigay recorded the renovation’s progress and the removal of asbestos from the building in subsequent visits. For her second series, Soft Solace (2021), she photographed spaces during the removal of the asbestos that she had not documented for the first series. The incoming light seems to offer a soft solace.

Acquisitions

The museum collection now includes four prints from Twilight Zone and four from Soft Solace. Since the Depot re-opened today, visitors can once again see Panyigay’s surprising and poetic works as large-format prints in the presentation ‘Museum Renovation’ about the process of the renovating the adjacent museum building.

‘It is valuable for the museum to see the development of the building through the eyes of an artist. The resulting images have a hopeful quality because even though the building is now in a sorry state, seen through her eyes, it is clear that its beauty has not been lost. As a museum, we want to capture the process in non-documentary ways and these photographs are part of that.’

- Cathy Jacob, Head of Presentations Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen

About the artist

Satijn Panyigay lives and works in Utrecht. She makes photographic works in which silence and a slowing of time are central. The precise yet poetic analogue photographs suggest presence in empty spaces. Although her images are devoid of people, they remain surprisingly human. In her ongoing project, of which both series about Boijmans are part, Panyigay records empty exhibition spaces in leading Dutch museums that normally display contemporary art. Her work will be shown by Galerie Caroline O'Breen at Art Rotterdam from 19 through 22 May.