James Baldwin: This Morning, This Evening, So Soon – Turkey Saved My Life

• Date:
• Location: West Den Haag

In the spring of 2026, West Den Haag presents ‘This Morning, This Evening, So Soon – Turkey Saved My Life’, an exhibition on the influence of writer and activist James Baldwin. Guided by Baldwin’s moral compass, various artists explore the in-between space of themes such as exile, queerness, and new forms of resistance.

Through his radical honesty about race, sexuality, and identity, Baldwin serves as a mirror for our time. His voice resonates today, in a society once again grappling with freedom, identity, and cultural uprooting.

James Baldwin fled the United States for Europe in 1948 to escape suffocating racism and homophobia. Although Baldwin’s years in Turkey (1961–1971) are hardly known in the Netherlands, they were crucial for his literary development. Here he found rest, love, collaboration, and freedom. In this exhibtion, exile is therefore not seen as loss, but rather as a radical position for new forms of humanity and community. In the tension between exile and homecoming, the artists find their starting point to explore themes such as identity and queerness, using the in-between space as a starting point for resistance.

The presentation at West Den Haag invites visitors to reflect through art, photography, performance, and literature on themes such as freedom, exile, love, identity, and queer resistance. For Baldwin, identity is never a final destination but a struggle, a movement, a negotiation. Baldwin’s queerness is not separated from his thinking but placed at the center as a source of moral clarity. The participating artists demonstrate how queer imagination recalibrates our current struggle for freedom and humanity, with the pursuit of human dignity forming the backbone of this exhibition.

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