Spring oor die hek, breek jou nek! / Jump over the gate, break your neck are the final lines in an Afrikaans children’s song used to taunt others. The exhibition, Breek Jou Nek is an elaboration of the tension described in this song: where innocence and domesticity are framed by an undercurrent of violence.

The exhibition is the continuation of Kruger’s journey into the intersection of nostalgia and discomfort. It seeks to create an environment where personal memories are contradicted by the social realities that contextualise them. Growing up as a white Afrikaner South African, Kruger finds himself in an ever-editing condition, asking himself: How did my memories of farms and sunsets and Safari’s and gates and electric fences come to be? What is the price of my comfort? Breek Jou Nek features familiar and often stereotyped images from the South African landscape and subverts them into symbols which denote their strange power.

Kruger is the unreliable narrator of his story, but one which tries to paint a larger brush that connects the geography of the Netherlands with South Africa. South Africa is a land of friendly vicious dogs and ornate sharp fences. A place where reddinging pale faces stare at the golden hours of rolling empty hills. Kruger finds himself a constant tourist, both home and away, scrounging together icons and stereotypes as he goes. Everything has become oranje, blanje, blou!

In installations combining his paintings with found materials, Michal Kruger investigates a complicated personal and political history. Kruger has always been aware of his identity as a white Afrikaner. In his own words, it comes with a feeling of discomfort. Kruger grew up in a privileged environment, surrounded mostly by white people in a predominantly black country. It wasn’t until his university studies that he started to reassess his past and his own identity. This process has shaped his artistic process, using the lens of his identity to understand his place in the world. Kruger’s choice of material and motifs typical to both South African and Dutch visual culture plays an important role. While primarily working as a painter, Kruger utilizes three-dimensional objects to connect the paintings on the wall with the space they are situated in and, at the same time, the viewer.

Michal Kruger (b. 1994, Johannesburg) is a Groningen based artist. He completed his MFA at Frank Mohr Institute in 2020.