Hans Nefkens
Hans Nefkens © Roberto Ruiz

“Once I had started collecting, the question was, how? I didn’t want to collect [in order] to have things in my house or in store. My idea has always been to share with others.”

So explains the Barcelona-based, Dutch-born collector Han Nefkens on his unusual strategy: to acquire artworks exclusively for museums. His 500-strong holdings are currently on loan to various European institutions in Tilburg, Amsterdam and Rotterdam as “promised gifts” and will go to them permanently after he dies.

Videos produced through his foundation have been shown in the Lincoln Center and at MoMA New York. Last year the film Liminal, produced by the Peruvian artist Maya Watanabe with the foundation, was shown in Boston’s Rose Art Museum.

The number of awards and grants Nefkens has already created is dizzying, and include ones for video art, for fashion creators, for contemporary art and even for Spanish-speaking writers. Yet he is unassuming and modest, seemingly without any desire for fame. “I have a great desire to connect with people and be close to them, sharing art is a way to do this,” he says.

For the last three years Nefkens’ foundation has identified promising video artists and commissioned them to make a new work, which is then placed on permanent loan with the museum that has collaborated on the selection process

Installation view of 'Liminal' by Maya Watanabe at La Casa Encendida, Madrid in 2019. Produced by the Han Nefkens Foundation
Installation view of 'Liminal' by Maya Watanabe at La Casa Encendida, Madrid in 2019. Produced by the Han Nefkens Foundation © Roberto Ruiz

I spoke to Nefkens just as the Covid-19 pandemic was beginning to appear in Europe, but before travel was curbed. We met at the WEILS contemporary art centre in Brussels, where work by the latest recipient of the foundation’s grant, the Vietnamese artist Thao Nguyen Phan, was on show. The location was noisy, with schoolchildren and visitors chattering between the potted plants in the café, and several people stopping to greet Nefkens. Among them was Chris Dercon, former director of Tate Modern, now at the Grand Palais in Paris, who offered his congratulations on the show.

Phan’s video “Becoming Alluvium” depicts the Vietnamese countryside — its beauty, but also the destruction wrought by climate change, mixing poetry by Rabindranath Tagore and Marguerite Duras with photography and Buddhist images. (It is due to be shown in an exhibition at London’s Chisenhale Gallery from June 26, if the lockdown has been lifted.)

Now in his late sixties, Nefkens comes from a wealthy family of entrepreneurs in Rotterdam. Softly spoken and constantly smiling, with a white beard and piercing blue eyes, he looks like everyone’s favourite uncle. But he has faced challenges in his lifetime: he was born with defects in his arms, and had two dramatic near-death experiences that have certainly shaped the man he is today.

Still from Thao Nguyen Phan's 'Becoming Alluvium' (2019), produced by the Han Nefkens Foundation
Still from Thao Nguyen Phan's 'Becoming Alluvium' (2019), produced by the Han Nefkens Foundation

“I always felt different from the other boys in school,” he starts. “I was more interested in observing than participating. My parents had 16th- and 17th-century paintings, and one day [when] I was only eight years old I looked at one and I saw it — I saw it differently! — and that is the same feeling I still get today, when I look at a work of art.”

He was already spending long periods in museums, notably at the Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, when he left the Netherlands to pursue a degree in communications, firstly in France and then the US, where he met his partner of 41 years, the Mexican Felipe Rodriguez. Together they moved to live in Mexico.

“At that time, I didn’t see how there could be a place for me in the art world, despite my love of art: I worked in Mexico City as a local correspondent for Dutch radio, and as a stringer for NBC and NPR,” Nefkens says.

But disaster struck in 1987 when he contacted HIV. “They told me I didn’t have long to live,” he recalls. But thanks to a doctor in Amsterdam, Joep Lange, he was treated with a then controversial combination of medicines. “I’m giving Joep credit here, for saving my life,” says Nefkens simply. After Lange and his partner Jacqueline van Tongeren were killed in the downed Malaysia Airlines flight over Ukraine in 2014, Nefkens established a fellowship for African artists, at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, in van Tongeren’s name.

Reversing the trajectory of almost all other collectors, Nefkens started by talking to institutions before acquiring any art. “I didn’t buy anything for a year and just looked at art in museums, fairs, galleries and artists’ studios,” he says. “It was only after I had the arrangement with Sjarel Ex, director of the Boijmans, that the works would go on loan to his museum, that I started to purchase art.”

Still from Pilpilotti Rist's 'Fifty Cinquante'
Still from Pilpilotti Rist's 'Fifty Cinquante' © Han Nefkens Foundation Collection

His first acquisition was a video installation by Pipilotti Rist called “Cinquante Fifty”, which was first conceived for the spaces of an underground car park. It shows three figures isolated and seemingly unaware of the camera’s presence. Nefkens already knew Rist’s work, having been mesmerised by her video installation “Remake of the Weekend” at the Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1999.

What he calls the “final push” came in 2001 when he bought the Rist. “The Rist was my first major art purchase,” he says. “From that moment on I went on a bit of a purchasing spree, buying several each by Roni Horn, Thomas Ruff, Bernard Frieze and Shirin Neshat among others.”

Initially Nefkens’ approaches to museum directors in Holland were rebuffed. “They weren’t interested in collaborating with a private person,” he explains. The exception was Ex at the Boijmans, and about two years after Nefkens started collaborating with him, other museums became interested. He started working with them, including the De Pont in Tilburg and Photography Museum Huis Marseille in Amsterdam, where he has works on loan as promised gifts.

It was a different model for collecting. “Even well-known artists sometimes can’t finance the production of new work,” Nefkens says. “So by doing it this way, you don’t start with the artwork, you start with the artist, the idea — or even before the idea is there.” Among the artists he has acquired are Jeff Wall, Olafur Eliasson, Bill Viola, Tony Oursler, Shirin Neshat, Sam Taylor-Wood, Thomas Rentmeister, Dan Graham and Diana Thater; the works have been lent to museums in Essen, Tilburg, Amsterdam, Dunkirk as well as the Boijmans in Rotterdam.

'Children, nine transparencies in lightboxes' (1988) by Jeff Wall
'Children, nine transparencies in lightboxes' (1988) by Jeff Wall

But in late 2001 another disaster struck: Nefkens almost died of encephalitis triggered by HIV. “I was in hospital for three months, unable to speak, eat or even walk,” he recalls. It took years for him to recover, but he survived the ordeal — and recounts it in a book in Dutch, De gevlogen vogel (The Bird has Flown: Notes on a Regained Life) published in 2008, one of four books he has authored. “When I returned home, the only thing I wanted to see was my art,” he says.

His philanthropy was initially more diverse — in 2004 he created ArtAids, which uses art to increase awareness of the stigma around Aids and to fund research. He also became involved in cutting-edge fashion, creating an award in the field. Fashion pieces by Viktor & Rolf, Hussein Chalayan, Iris van Herpen and others have also been given by the foundation to the Boijmans on long-term loan.

However about three years ago, at an exhibition called The Future of Fashion is Now, shown in Rotterdam, Shenzhen and Shanghai, a Chinese curator said he was interested in showing Nefkens’ videos. “He approached me during the opening,” says Nefkens: “While the videos weren’t included in that exhibition, they were shown in a separate exhibition called In Search of Global Poetry to which the entire He Xiangning Museum in Shenzhen was dedicated about a year later. I had never thought of that — but I gradually decided to focus exclusively on video: I thought, I can show it worldwide, there are no transportation or insurance costs; many young artists work with video. And virtually no one else specifically supports video art.” The other initiatives were wound down.

'Tooba' (2002) by Shirin Neshat
'Tooba' (2002) by Shirin Neshat © Han Nefkens Collection

Nefkens’ foundation will only outlast him by a few years: after his death it will “sunset” when all the projects are completed, and all his art will become the property of the museums to which it is promised.

Nefkens is currently locked down in Barcelona. I ask him by email what his thoughts are on the current crisis. “All of us are touched by the pandemic, which wasn’t the case with other health scares like SARS or HIV,” he replies. “Suddenly we all have something in common. I would like this sharing to continue . . . and I am convinced that art plays an important role in establishing that connection.”

As he says: “I never had a desire for ownership. And when I contracted HIV at 33 I realised that life is very fragile and short. That’s helped me see what’s really important. Who cares about ownership if you can’t take things with you?”

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