Between Histories, a Photographer Creates Her Own

Farren van Wyk has spent her career examining what it means to exist across communities—geographically, culturally, and racially. Mixedness is my Mythology (2021–ongoing) is the result of that habitation: an expansive, tender body of work that takes mixedness both as subject matter and as a way of seeing.

Born in South Africa in 1993 to a Dutch father and South African mother, van Wyk moved with her family to the Netherlands at age six, escaping the oppressive determinations of race and class that apartheid imposed on people of color. Developing an interest in photography as a teenager, she decided to study art at the University of the Arts Utrecht, where she would develop her project Die lewe is nie reg vir my nie (This is not the right life for me) (2016–ongoing) as her undergraduate thesis. From the start, her photographic interest was rooted in her family history and heritage. For This is not the right life for me, van Wyk returned to the community that she had been born into, photographing residents and interviewing them about their experiences with gang culture post-apartheid. Based in research and conversation, van Wyk’s collaborative, deliberate portraits seek to correct negative stereotypes about a home she never knew.

Yet, as her confidence with the medium grew, she realized the documentary ethos of her undergraduate program was slowly becoming misaligned with the way she wanted to make work. “Gang culture became this theme that I could research and understand what was happening to my community on a macro level,” van Wyk says. “Slowly, as I also grew as a person, I wanted to think about the micro level—an intimate family project. I was growing throughout the years of building a practice and understanding who I was, but senses of belonging were the core threads through everything that I was doing.”

The imposed insularity of the pandemic provided both time and space to make that goal a reality, and she began Mixedness is my Mythology as a means to visualize the coming together of her South African and Dutch identities. The traditional Dutch farm where she grew up, historically understood as a white space, provided the perfect backdrop for staging portraits of herself, her brothers, and her parents. A particular portrait of her brother, Alexander, standing in front of a white brick wall, his hair waved, adorned with a thin, gold chain and wearing their grandfather’s old overalls and traditional Dutch clogs, was when things began to truly click. “If you have this idea of how a Dutch farm is supposed to look like, this is very much not it. But this is our lived identity, a coming together of these two cultures,” she says.

Working in analogue black and white was a conscious choice for van Wyk, informed by her studies for her master’s in visual anthropology. In her university research, she was taken by the historical, anthropological portraits of people of color she would uncover. “I started seeing myself in these people, in their portraits and in their image, but the stories that were accompanying the archives were so inhumane,” she says. “It was very much not how I want to use the medium, but it was beneficial to understand how photography was used, in order to be able to counter that.”

The emotional register of van Wyk’s portraits fluctuates between tender and celebratory but maintains a determined sense of defiance throughout. Props, gestures, and garments serve as symbols of cultural cross-pollination—these interferant references convey the true in-betweenness of experience, pulling not only from their African and Dutch roots but also from global Black diasporic culture. “I don’t feel represented by this white notion of identity,” she says. “I don’t feel represented by Blackness either. So then, what does it mean to be me, in this in-between? In this gray space?” Mixedness is my Mythology is a proposition, a reflection of van Wyk’s questioning, and, ultimately, a space for healing.

Farren van Wyk is a shortlisted artist for the 2026 Aperture Portfolio Prize, an international competition that spotlights new talent in contemporary photography.