Anka Hashin - Anachronismen

A view of the past from the future

Anka Hashin was born in the former Soviet Union and works as both a writer and a visual artist. In 2023, she made her debut with the absurdist short story collection *Leap Year*, which received rave reviews. *NRC* described her as “an original voice” within Dutch literature, whilst *De Haagse* wrote: “A welcome addition to the all too neatly manicured garden of Dutch literature.” In 2025, her second collection of short stories, *Poging tot Fiasco*, was published by Prometheus.

Meanwhile, she has also exhibited her visual art, including in group exhibitions at Speechless Artspace in The Hague: drawings accompanying stories by Pushkin, and earlier this year a series of paintings entitled ‘Troublezone’, alongside an installation by the Dutch/South African artist Frans van Hoek. Her first solo exhibition, entitled ‘Anachronisms – a view of the past from the future’, will be on display at Pulchri in August, featuring new work created very recently during an artist-in-residence stay at Het Lage Noorden on the Wadden Sea.

Hashin says of her work: ‘Many of the paintings I am exhibiting seem to be set in a passing (promising) era. Yet my work is never unambiguous or tied to any one specific place or time. Rather, it aspires to be something independent and unique. They are more like phantasmagoria. One might also think of parallel or distorted realities.’

The colours in my works are subdued; the lines are strongly defined, almost bold. The compositions are sometimes busy, sometimes very understated. A boat on a desolate beach, a factory with tall chimneys, a building site or an empty square – they all exude a certain melancholy and draw their energy from tranquillity. Although no people appear here, their traces are evident everywhere. In any case, it is a person without age.

Although these works deliberately lack technical precision (the casual form creates more space for emotion), I have opted for a three-point perspective, so that the viewer can, as it were, view the image from above or from below.

A view of the past from the future is, rationally speaking, an impossibility, but in a painting anything is possible – both reality and illusion. Just as close and as far away as a landscape in the background of a Quattrocento painting.’