Koeraaj Koeraaj

Sun-bleached Central Asian steppes, crumbling adobe ruins, shuttered village streets, and dimly lit interiors pierced by sharp shafts of daylight form the visual world of these colour photographs. Rather than a literal travel reportage, the images—some rendered with deliberate motion blur to foreground colour and mood—focus on quiet traces of human and animal survival in an arid environment: sheer curtains billowing in a doorway, mannequins dressed in wedding gowns, an empty train waiting in the heat, a camel's hump filling the frame, and homes fashioned from abandoned water tanks near the dried-up Aral Sea in Uzbekistan. Photographer and filmmaker Marjoleine Boonstra collaborated with writer Céline Linssen, who contributed thirteen short stories inspired by the photographs and linked by the recurring motif of the koeraaj, the tumbleweed blown across the plains. Designed by Willem van Zoetendaal and published alongside a 2012 exhibition at Galerie Witteveen in Amsterdam, the book weaves image and fiction into an open-ended dialogue about resilience and imagination.