Your Coloring Book, 1996-1998

Often very harmful things start out as very harmless

work 41/46

Audience participatory installation. Various locations.

A coloring book based on archival images from Nazi Germany. Viewers were invited to draw or write in these books with the provided crayons. Your Coloring Book hovers on the border between childhood innocence and deliberate manipulation. The viewer is invited to feel the unprejudiced perceptions of a child, yet is unable to do so because of his or her contradictory adult consciousness. After the Utrecht installation, the project traveled to five cities with a specific historical connection to the Holocaust.

The exhibition took on a different character in each location, incorporating local furniture and icons. In each city, the visitors, media, and even government reacted very differently. Your Coloring Book – a wandering installation concluded two years later in Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum with an exhibition documenting these personal and sometimes extreme responses.

Stage 1

Artist Space Casco, Utrecht, the Netherlands

Stage 2

The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel

Stage 3

Kunstcentrum Markt 17, Enschede, the Netherlands

Stage 4

The Contemporary Art Centre of Vilnius, Vilnius, Lithuania

Stage 5

Contemporary Art Gallery Bunkier Sztuki, Krakow Poland

Stage 6 

Haus am Kleistpark, Berlin, Germany

Stage 7 

Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands