Studio Seine presents a selection of photographs from the series 'My Dearest Teun,' made by Tahné Kleijn at the curated section The Past Present. 'My Dearest Teun,' reconstructs the story of the artist’s grandmother, Pieta Kleijn, who was imprisoned with her newborn son in the Japanese women’s camp Tjideng (Batavia, now Jakarta) during World War II. Despite the deadly prohibition on writing, she secretly kept two diaries and a baby book, all addressed to her husband Teun — a sailor conscripted into the Dutch Navy. Her words became a fragile lifeline of love and endurance.
The complete series comprises over 40 staged photographs, each inspired by a diary fragment. Through light and composition reminiscent of Vermeer, the artist visualizes the tension between tenderness and despair, privilege and victimhood within a collapsing colonial world. 'My Dearest Teun' transforms forbidden words into living images, reclaiming a silenced female voice and revealing how personal memory can resist historical erasure.