Episode 3

Edition of 3 + 2 AP

Diptych. Dimensions: 204cm x 116cm
Transparency in light-boxes, custom glass panels with cutouts, window frames, stickers

EPISODE SYNOPSIS

From their gold-detailed Kassa, or box office, two employees sell tickets for a VOC swing ship attraction named Achilles. While visually separated from each other, they might be in the same boat. However, in this diptych, the play with pairs highlight inequality: the man and the girl, the cat and the fish, the oppressor and the oppressed, the past and the present.

The map unfolds a journey through time where the Achilles sails from the Orient into a theme park. As the allegory’s title implies, Episode 3 points at the Achilles heel of Dutch history. It is an indictment against the Disneyfication of the Dutch colonial past: the transformation of an unsettling history - marked by slavery, oppression and exploitation - into a sanitized and pleasant story that continues to feed a national sense of pride. Once again, to make a profit?

VIVARIUM

Vivarium is an ongoing series of constructed dioramas, called Episodes. In the creation of these worlds Hardy fuses his imagination, personal memories and true events into ‘purposeful fiction’. Together, Vivarium’s Episodes explore the coherence and complexity of our zeitgeist.

For each Episode, Hardy designs, builds and photographs a new world in his studio. His photomontages are shown life-size - one-to-one - in a lightbox with a window frame, resulting in hyper-realistic works that spark a direct encounter between the viewer and the subject. 

As Hardy places one or more characters in a meticulously arranged setting, he merges ambivalent, melancholic scenes of private moments in the public, with social issues such as conspiracy thinking, racial profiling, and pre-defined gender identities. By addressing a different topic in each Episode while applying a consistent working method, Vivarium is an expanding multiverse of portals where life takes place.

Each constructed tableau takes 3 to 4 months to complete. Vivarium is an ongoing project that Hardy started in 2018.