Sara Blokland’s work offers both an analysis and a reflection on the complex role of photography in its relation to colonial and postcolonial cultural legacies. After studying Theatre Design and Photography at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, and Fine Arts at the Sandberg Institute (MFA), she continued her studies at the University of Leiden where she received an MA in Film and Photographic Studies with a thesis on « Photography framing poverty ». Her work evolves through a constant interrogation of photography and its relationship to the construction of social narratives around issues such as identity, representation, migration, colonial legacies or separation. This double line of thought was already audible in her first photography series, Fam (2001). It was then amplified in Related: A Photographic Performance (2007) or multimedia installations such as Reproduction of Family (2006-2017), which highlight the weight of private and family archives in the process of writing postcolonial trajectories.

S. Blokland’s work soon favoured the telling of stories through images rather than imagery. As a result, she gradually combined photography with curatorial and research activities. Her process then expanded from working on family archives to developing a reflexive language of memory that questions the continuum of (post)colonial narratives in the Dutch cultural space. In works such as Home (2004) or A Grey Room of Gold (2022), S. Blokland proceeded to materialise the intricate entanglement of colonial and postcolonial temporalities. In doing so, she transcends photography as a documentary tool in order to reveal the ways in which it reinterprets and manipulates the observed world. In the exhibition Identities: Contemporary Caribbean Perspectives (2020), in which she took on the role of both curator and artist, she questions the role of the museum as a producer of culture in a postcolonial context, and the place of Caribbean narratives within it.

S. Blokland’s work has been exhibited at Kumho Museum of Art (Seoul), LMAK Projects Gallery (New York), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), Museum voor Moderne Kunst (Arnhem) and Gemeentemuseum Den Haag (The Hague). Her work is found in several collections, including the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), the Netherlands Photo Museum (Rotterdam), the Kunstmuseum Den Haag (The Hague) or, amongst others, the Museum of Fine Arts (Houston).