Four siblings stand in formation in a Dutch landscape. Bare tree branches criss-cross a wintry grey sky. The setting is unmistakably rural. Two of the siblings perch on an old agricultural wagon, as though revisiting a long-discarded vehicle that delivered them here from another world. Draped across its wooden front are African animal skins. Graphic zebra stripes and the cross-lined branches overhead echo and contradict each other at the same time. Similarly, each sibling wears farmer’s clogs and overalls, from under which a hoodie or popped collar peeks: an assembly of outerwear suited to working the streets or the land in equal measure. This work, Huntees, is from Mixedness is my Mythology. Centred in the frame, surrounded by her brothers, is photographer Farren van Wyk. She holds a long pistol, pointed towards the sky - but it is the camera, set up before the self-created scene, from which she shoots.

The resulting image resists easy placement. It is neither entirely here nor there. Neither purely Dutch nor South African. It moves instead through a diasporic visual language. In the foreground, one brother takes the knee, anchored by a single clogged foot, an animal skin draped over his shoulder, his curly afro visible. The gesture recalls Colin Kaepernick’s protest against racial injustice during the US national anthem. Drawing from diverse references, lends the image a layered quality, shaped by history, rupture, movement, and reassembly.

‘I use photography to reclaim what it means to be a person of colour.’ Mixedness is my Mythology approaches identity not as something fixed, but as something constructed, and therefore something that can be deconstructed and reclaimed.’

Born in South Africa in 1993, just before the end of apartheid, van Wyk moved to the Netherlands at age six, when her mother married into a Dutch family. Her practice emerges from this shift, and from a history in which racial classification functioned as a tool of control and oppression. In apartheid South Africa, the term ‘coloured’ grouped people of mixed heritage into a single category, compressing a multiplicity of lineages into something legible and governable.

FARREN VAN WYK is a South African and Dutch Photographer and Educator. She holds a BA in Photography and an MA in Cultural & Visual Anthropology and recently opened her first solo museum exhibition at Fotomuseum Den Haag. Her research-based photographic practice is a homecoming away from home, the meeting of two worlds and the space where she connects to the African diaspora. Through portraiture, she unravels the intertwined narratives that span centuries, exploring and connecting people, places, movements, history and memories. For van Wyk, photography is a medium to weave iconographies of mixedness.

JULIA-BETH HARRIS is an author, poet and performer from South Africa, now based in Amsterdam. With a background in design and creative writing, she brings a distinctly visual and multi-layered quality to her texts. Her work moves between continents, reflecting her position between the global North and South. Writing as an act of unification, she builds bridges between cultures and communities.