Blad 139 uit Stamboek van de leerlingen der Koloniale School voor Meisjes en Vrouwen te 's-Gravenhage deel II (1930-1949) Possibly 1946 - 1949

This spread from a student register, compiled in The Hague between 1930 and 1949, strikes me as a found collage of visual data. I can imagine a person carefully inking the details of each student on the ruled pages, then glueing small headshots that mark her place and time. In each entry, I feel the weight of information: names, birthdates, addresses, and places of origin. It's like a minimalist grid painting where human lives are registered with an even hand. The handwritten entries become gestural marks in their own right. They remind me of Cy Twombly's scrawls or the systematic mark-making of Hanne Darboven. The photos give a tender peek into the lives of young women in a colonial school. Like an Agnes Martin grid, these humble photographs and notations speak to the universal in the particular, echoing the way artists make work in response to one another across the ages.