Cihad Caner’s “(Re)membering the riots in Afrikaanderwijk in 1972 or guest, host, ghos-ti”

In August 1972, a Turkish landlord evicted a Dutch woman living in the Afrikaanderwijk neighborhood of Rotterdam. This event became the trigger for riots which saw people from all over the country pour into the Afrikaanderwijk to watch as anti-immigration protesters destroyed homes in the majority-immigrant neighborhood. Ten years ago, the Turkish artist Cihad Caner moved to Afrikaanderwijk. Having happened upon the story of this riot, he attempted to reconstruct a collective understanding of its history with his 2023 film (Re)membering the riots in Afrikaanderwijk in 1972 or guest, host, ghos-ti.

The exhibition is sparse. A white room is scattered with archival images scratched into red MDF plates. Inscribed into some of the plates are scenes showing people rioting on the streets of Afrikaanderwijk; others show the inside of immigrant homes that are visibly looted and in disarray. With this simple gesture, Caner places the Dutch rioters as the outsiders on the streets and the immigrant workers as the insiders in their homes—probing the latter’s status as outsiders in the Dutch collective psyche. The viewer, meanwhile, is made to oscillate between being on the inside and the outside as they navigate the installation.

Caner is an artist of Turkish descent, but he is relatively new to Afrikaanderwijk, and as such not directly affected by the events of the riot: through his work, the local specificity of these events takes on a broader geopolitical significance. The exhibition’s South African curator Gabi Ngcobo, director of Kunstinstituut Melly, is even newer to Rotterdam; this show is part of a series of exhibitions inaugurating her tenure, featuring work by several South African artists. The neighborhood’s very name commemorates the Anglo-Boer War in South Africa, while its street names venerate figures who actively supported Dutch settler colonialism there: Paul Kruger, Christiaan de Wet and Joseph Chamberlain (until recently, the Kunstinstituut Melly was known as Witte de With, but changed its name to distance itself from the seventeenth-century naval commander).1 The show’s presentation is inflected with a historical context that perfectly mirrors that of Afrikaanderwijk. A reading of the Dutch majority as outsiders both in Afrikaanderwijk and in South Africa rejigs the power positions.

In a two-channel video installation, Caner places archival footage alongside a recent re-enactment of the same events, inviting the viewer to retrace their steps and look for what they didn’t catch in the original. A simple game of spot the difference softens the punch. The sharp emotions in the archival footage are constructed by monotonal re-enactments, opening space for many possible readings of the three-day riot. There is a glitch in the archive. There is no singular original truth to be uncovered. Some people remember the event as a small occurrence that didn’t deserve the amount of media attention it garnered. Yet here we see immigrant workers with their skulls split open.

The exhibition is decisive: it knows where it is taking us. At the end of the show is an activities room in which audiences are invited to sort through archival documents, to decide which materials are important to their own perspectives. Another translation occurs here, as members of the public place archival images onto an overhead projector. The images are then projected on a board to create a collective collage. The third space of the exhibition, perhaps, is out in the streets of the Afrikaanderwijk neighborhood, just across the river from the gallery, where you can see things for yourself. To add your particular brand of truth to the various truths that Caners offers up.