​​​​​​​​Solo Exhibition Jan Banning

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This solo-exhibition presents a comprehensive overview of Jan Banning’s work, featuring a selection of his most renowned series, including Bureaucratics, Comfort Women, Law & Order, Down and Out in the South, Red Utopia, and National Identities.

In addition, Fontana is proud to showcase work from his most recent series, Blood Bonds: Reconciliation in Post-Genocide Rwanda.

This powerful project explores a universal truth: every genocide eventually comes to an end. Survivors, the bereaved, perpetrators, and bystanders have no choice but to clear the ruins and try to live together again. But how do you do that when mutual distrust still smolders, and fear and hatred continue to glow beneath the surface? It requires a healing process that takes years—sometimes generations, even

In Blood Bonds Dutch artist Jan Banning and writer Dick Wittenberg have portrayed, in images and words, unlikely pairs: survivors of the 1994 Rwanda genocide alongside perpetrators who played a direct role in harming—often killing—their family members and loved ones. Individuals whom they have since forgiven and with whom they have reconciled: a rare and deeply moving phenomenon.

 

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Jan Banning is a Dutch independent photographic artist, basesd in Utrecht, The Netherlands. He was born in Almelo (Netherlands) on May 4, 1954, from Dutch East Indies parents, and he studied social and economic history at the Radboud University of Nijmegen. Both of these facts have had a strong influence on his photographic works.His roots are reflected in several of his subjects, such as in ‘Comfort Women’: Indonesian women who were forced to serve as sex slaves for the Japanese military during the Second World War; also in ‘Traces of War: Survivors of the Burma and Sumatra Railways’, about former forced labourers in South East Asia during that same period; the repatriation of elderly Moluccans from the Netherlands to the Indonesian Moluccas in ‘Pulang’.

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Power, justice and (in)equality are central to Banning’s work. The social political environment is put at the fore and it often concerns subjects that have been neglected within the arts and are difficult to visualise: political systems; criminal justice; colonialism’s heritage; long-term consequences of war. Sometimes the work is the result of a sociological or anthropological classifying approach, such as ‘Bureaucratics’, a comparative study of the world of government officials in eight countries worldwide; or Law&Order, which compares criminal justice systems in Colombia, France, Uganda and the USA. Other times he focuses more on psychological impact that major social or individual events have had on individuals (‘Comfort Women’, ‘Traces of War’, ‘Down and Out in the South’, The Verdict).

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His portraits are always respectful and warmhearted. But irony is also one of his weapons: e.g. in ‘Bureaucratics’; or in ‘The Sweating Subject’, a mocking take on colonial photography as well as on its heir, present-day western journalism. Or, in a more subtle way, in Red Utopia, about the remnants of communist parties in five countries.
His projects often have a personal point of departure, but are never ‘private’: he places the subjects that stem from his private life in a larger social context. To give an example: the history of Banning’s father and grandfather during WWII is not only limited to something biographical about two family members, but is broadened into a visual and textual research into the long-term influence of WWII experiences on European and Asian former forced labourers (in ‘Traces of War’).

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Thursday 27 November 2025 - Saturday 17 January 2026​​

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For an overview of the available works click HERE​​​​

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