Satijn Panyigay makes photographic work that invites its viewer to slow down. She captures the silence of empty spaces and, staging it as a photograph, aims to unveil the layer underneath. Working with uninhabited grounds, Panyigay searches for presence in a seeming emptiness.
Soft Solace is part of a larger project of Satijn Panyigay. It is dedicated to capturing the character of the empty exhibition spaces of leading Dutch museums that display contemporary art. She photographs them vacant, in between the shows. In 2019, she shot Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen just after its closure for a major renovation for the series Twilight Zone (Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen) (2020). Panyigay captured the uncovered museum’s essence at a moment between the museum’s closure and the start of the rebuilding, a twilight zone that no one sees. The follow-up series Liminal Land (2021) was created in the museum’s brand new depot, just before the art collection was housed there. Later, the museum asked to photograph their building once again, during the asbestos remediation process. The series Soft Solace (2021) emerged from this.
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (Rotterdam) has recently closed its doors for a long-term, large-scale renovation. The museum walls, stripped of all the icons, got caught on camera as an object, losing their dominant role of a background that accommodates art.
The rooms of Boijmans Van Beuningen have a recognizable architecture. Its spaces where icons of art can normally be seen are now empty, pending. The walls, floors, ceilings, colors, the incidence of light and traces of the previous exhibitions fill in the blanks of the museum’s identity. The empty rooms get to become the artwork.
In Satijn Panyigay’s oeuvre, there is always a harmonious balance between the light and the dark, cheerful and gloomy, resilience and vulnerability. Her work, in absence of any direct human narratives, is surprisingly humane – she addresses the feelings of its observer.
Satijn Panyigay (1988) lives and works in Utrecht. Recent exhibitions include Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Fotomuseum Den Haag, Museum Tot Zover, Villa Mondriaan, and art fairs such as Art Rotterdam, Unseen Photo Fair, PAN Amsterdam and Amsterdam Art Fair.