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Contemporary Art as an Intervener
Disrupting Power and Facilitating Sustainable Change in Narratives of Colonialism in the National Museum of World Cultures, the Netherlands
Juliet Harrison 12761249
Zico Albaiquni, Ruwatan Tanah Air Beta, Reciting Rites in its Sites (2019), oil and synthetic polymer on canvas, 600 x 200 cm. Commissioned by Framer Framed. Image courtesy of Framer Framed, photograph by Eva Broekema (2020)
2 Submitted to the Graduate School of Humanities at the University of Amsterdam in partial
fulfilment of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts in Heritage Studies: Museum Studies
Student: Juliet Harrison Student Number: 12761249 Supervisor: Dr. Mirjam Hoijtink Second Reader: Dr. Dos Elshout Word Count: 23,619
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Abstract
Ethnographic museums today continually try to grapple with their (post)colonial baggage as an institution built upon 18th century Enlightenment ideals, with a collection which, more often than not, grew out of western colonialism. Contemporarily termed World Culture museums, the ethnographic space is experiencing an upheaval from a museum solely focused on the past, to one that collects contemporary art. Alongside a name change, a global phenomenon of using contemporary art and artist interventions to provide institutional critique within ethnographic World Culture museums is becoming more prevalent. Does this enmeshment of old and new, a transhistorical practice, have consequences for the ethnographic museum? Likewise, whilst World Culture museums welcome artists and their institutional critique, is this outsourcing a solution? This thesis explores how art is used to intervene in narratives of colonialism within the ethnographic World Culture museum and critically examine why contemporary art is being utilised. Through an investigation into exhibitions located in the four museums of the National Museum of World Cultures in the Netherlands, this thesis builds the case that the exhibitions make use of contemporary art(ists) interventions in order to criticise the coloniality built into the ethnographic museum’s history and collecting practice. However, due to the very infrastructure of the museum and the transiency of an intervention as a practice, a revolutionary change is inherently limited. In order to create durable, decolonising and postcolonial change, museum frameworks need to normalise the disruptive and interventionist practices contemporary art(ists) bring to the table.
Key words: intervention, contemporary art, ethnographic museum, postcolonial, decolonial,
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my supervisor Dr. Mirjam Hoijtink for guiding me throughout this thesis and the Master’s programme. Our discussions always left me budding with ideas and your insight and motivation were invaluable to me. I would also like to thank my second reader Dr. Dos Elshout for taking the time to read my work. I also owe my gratitude to the programme staff at the Heritage and Memory Studies. I am hugely grateful to Roy Villevoye for dedicating a day with me to discuss his experiences and thank you to Marieke Meijer and Rik Herder for taking the time to speak with me.
Finally, to my family and friends, near and far, a huge thanks for their continual support and optimism during an incredibly trying period. Your smiling faces across the phone screen, late-night edits and tea breaks, gave me great comfort and determination to keep going.
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Table of Contents
Introduction 6
Chapter 1: A Sign of the Times: Contemporary Art as an Interrogative Device into
Colonial History and Colonial Exhibition Practice 16
Collecting as Violence: The Practice of Colonial Collecting in Museums 17 Seeing Coloniality through Contradictions, Subversions and Ambivalences 21
Questioning the Use of Art to Expose Histories of Error 26
Chapter 2: The Life Energy of Contemporary Art: Transhistoricity and the Insertion of
New Perspectives 30
Complicating Time: The Past meets the Present 32
Worldviews Colliding 35
Questioning the Momentary Presence of Modernity 40
Chapter 3: Decolonising from the Outside in and Inside out: The Sustainability of
Interventions Embedded within a (Post)colonial Infrastructure 43
From the Outside In: Interventionist Discourses and Durable Change 44
From the Inside Out: Museum’s Transgressing into the Public Sphere 47
Questioning Decoloniality and Durability 50
Conclusion 54
Bibliography 58
List of Figures 64
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Introduction
Sitting in a vitrine titled, Metalwork 1723-1880, various silver goblets and carafes are aligned amongst iron shackles used in the enslavement of people. This juxtaposing installation, which viewed ‘silverware’ in the same vein as ‘slave shackles’ to criticise traditional museum exhibition practice, was not curated by accident, but part of Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum (1992) exhibition at the Maryland Centre for History and Culture (MCHC, formerly the Maryland Historical Society), in the United States. Whilst not distinctly termed an ethnographic museum, the MCHC was founded in 1844 to collect, preserve and study objects related to the people, places and events of Maryland; and in 1992 invited Fred Wilson to critically examine the museum’s collection and presentation of history. This was not the first time an institution focused on the past had invited the contemporary and modern art world into its walls; artist interventions have been occurring in (mainly art) museums since the 1970s. One could look to the Artist’s Eye in the National Gallery in London, UK, which began in 1977 and continues today, as an artist-as-curator annual programme with British contemporary artists invited to display their own work as well as (re)organise the collection. As Musteata (2018) notes, this became the impetus for many other similar projects internationally including MoMa's ‘Artist Choice’ (1989). Artist interventions escalated towards the 1990s and early 2000s, due to the development of critical museology during this time, and the insurgence of the so
Figure 1: Image of Fred Wilson’s Metal Work 1793-1880 vitrine, in ‘Mining the Museum’ (1992) exhibition at the Maryland Centre for History and Culture. Taken from Wilson and Halle (1994).
7 called ‘Memory Boom’ within Memory Studies and Postcolonialism in Cultural History discourse1. This look to the past placed a microscope on colonial narratives, exemplified by Wilson in 1992. What unites the Artist’s Eye with Mining the Museum, is the fact that the artist was invited into the museum institution to respond, retaliate or reflect on the museum collection and in some capacity, intervene in the way the museum had structured and represented history. Claire Robins, in Curious lessons in the Museum (2013), provides a clear definition of artists’ intervention; “A genre of art that becomes an interlocutor within the discourse of museum collections. It has the additional sense of alignment with the potential for inciting change in the museum” (2013, 2). Comparably, Khadija Carroll La, a Professor of Global Art at Birmingham University, who writes extensively on interventionist practices, makes reference to the term’s derivation of the Latin word, intervenire, meaning ‘to come between’. She writes, “Intervention in the context of artistic practices implies an artist aiming to disrupt power relations in the museum where pre-existing objects are often presented as an authoritative representation of a given culture” (2017, 217). This is quite clear in Wilson’s Mining the Museum, with such a discernible engagement with the history of slavery and the issues of continued racial injustice within the exhibition2. Named after the most pertinent exploitations of soil and people (which dramatically altered landscapes and social hierarchy), Wilson’s intervention is one of the first major museum initiatives to consult an artist in an attempt to deeply explore the systems and dynamics of colonialism. Hence the term ‘mine’, as Wilson’s mission was to dismantle the museum’s current white-centric viewpoint of history and its accounts of colonialism, slavery and abolition. With this in mind, the central research question of this thesis is: why do ethnographic World Culture museums utilise contemporary art(tists) to intervene, respond, and criticise their colonial institutional nature?
The notion of ‘colonialism’ is not a recent phenomenon, it existed long before the modern-day3. However, it can be broadly understood as the policy of domination and transfer of
populations to another country or territory (Kohn and Reddy 2017). Wilson’s intervention speaks
specifically to European-American settler colonialism and the very visible result of the genocide of First Nations Indigenous communities, also evident in the Southern Hemisphere, and the persisting racial injustices as part of forcible migration and enslavement of peoples from Africa and its associated racialised ideologies. Already, the complexity of western colonialism can be traced. Indeed, this research tries to reckon with the infrastructures which make up western colonialism and its pervasive intellectual control through the means of western imperialism, the way power is exercised through not only colonisation but implicit means of control (Ibid). Alongside military expansion and the inceptions of European empires spanning across Australia, Africa, the Americans and Asia, European cities such as London and Paris became world centres, where the World Trade Fairs or the World Exposition or Exhibition4 were introduced. Here, European nations showcased
1 The so-called Memory Boom grew out of an abundance of memory and a fear for social amnesia. This saw an increase in attention
to the multidisciplinary studies of the past and its memorialisation. Key texts include Pierra Nora’s (1989) leading work on Lieux de Mémoire, which argues for the integral spatial components to collective memory making in modern society. See also, Hobsbawm and Ranger Invented Tradition (1983) or Connerton's How Societies Remember (1989).
2 To get an understanding of Wilson’s intervention, see Wilson, F and Halle, H. “Mining the Museum” (1993).
3 The Oxford Dictionary defines colonialism as, “The policy or practice of acquiring full or partial political control over another
country, occupying it with settlers, and exploiting it economically”. Available at: https://www.lexico.com/definition/colonialism. 4 The first World Fair, or World Expo, was in London’s The Great Exhibition in 1851. Simultaneously, expositions explicitly tilted
8 their industrial and imperial achievements under the guise of ‘progress’, and exhibited those cultures seized by the colonial project, through objects collected from across overseas territories (Pieterse 1997). Moreover, locally produced goods were displayed in order to inspire new industries (Bloembergen 2006). Objects were then ‘donated’ to museums in the cities of world exhibitions, and today we see evidence of this when museums hold objects with similar traceable historiographies5.
Simultaneously through colonial and imperial expansion, there was a deep desire to possess the world. Thus, an intellectual project was initiated with the birth of anthropology, ethnology and ethnography. These disciplines were based on European superiority and subsequently led to orderings of the world through racial taxonomy and rational thought, with the ethnographic museum instated as an institution which collects objects and photographs in relation to the study of people and cultures. Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities (1983) writes, the creation of the museum, alongside the map and census, had profound influence on the colonial project, establishing a colonial imaginary intellectually, geographically and legitimately. Postcolonial Theorist Edward Said writes on this western intellectual control in his book Orientalism (1978). Said argues for a deep interrogation of the production of discourse across literature, media, universities and museums, since they perpetuate an orientalist perspective; a “western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient” (1978,11). He encourages us to view the world through an orientalist lens to uncover the ways western culture as a discourse and a body of knowledge inscribes particular forms of power: one of which is the reproduction of non-western cultures, or the Other, through the self-designation of the Self. This produces an imbalance of power creating ‘imaginative geographies’ which “fold distance into difference” and produces binary oppositions of Us and Them (1978, 54). Indeed, the museum represents the coagulation of this duality, as a western institution which houses collections from colonial encounters often beyond one nation’s colonial endeavours and uses these objects to perpetuate these Enlightenment ontologies. Through Orientalism we are able to comprehend the sheer magnitude of the systematic control of colonialism and imperialism. It is all about control, both territorially and intellectually.
The Museum as a Site of Power
Sociologist Tony Bennett engages with the pervasive control of the museum with his hypothesis of the ‘Exhibitionary Complex’ (1988). He argued a certain set of museological conditions, concrete and normalise the disciplinary practices, conceptualised by Foucault (1978), which subject the visitor to technologies of surveillance and representation within the museum. As well as this, these conditions standardise ideologies of evolutionary hierarchies and a desire to control and categorise the world. Most notably, the ordering of a totalising history that places the western, white man as the encompassing image of modernity and triumph, with a non-western ‘other’ and their associative material culture firmly placed in opposition, as an ahistorical inferior. This disciplinary power is inherent to the ethnographic museum, as it ensures an authoritative historical narrative,
London (1886) or Paris’ Exposition Universelle (1889). See Bloembergen (2006), for an in-depth inquiry into Dutch colonial presentations in World Fairs.
5 Consider the controversial Benin Bronzes, which can be found amongst several museums across the globe, notably the British
Museum and Ethnological Museum of Berlin, as well as the NMVW holding 98 works from the Kingdom of Benin. For more details see: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/benin-bronzes-restitution-1322807
9 deemed official and truth, to be perpetuated through its walls and into the visitor’s mind. One could argue, this colonial method of representation is part of the ‘longue durée’ of the ethnographic museum. The term was introduced by French historian Fernand Braudel6 who views history in its full totality, arguing historical events are only minor parts of a much larger picture, with the longue durée as the “long-standing and imperceptibly slowly changing relationships between people and the world which constitute the most fundamental (and hence the least questioned or analysed) aspects of social life” (Oxford Dictionary, 2021). Following Bennett’s pioneering of Critical Museum studies, this attention to history found in the postmodern and postcolonial theories of the 1990s, lead to what Robins terms, “an increasing incredulity towards meta-narratives” and induced a “demise of the tendency to present particular and partial constructions of meaning as universal knowledge” which are so readily concreted by the Exhibitionary Complex (2013, 149).
Subsequently, coming into the new millennium, the Netherlands saw an acceleration of public and academic debate into the Dutch role in western colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade, aspects often left out of the historical narrative. This was fuelled by the efforts of the June 30/July 1 Committee7 (1993), the creation of a government funded institution National Institute for the Study of Dutch Slavery and its Legacy, or NiNsee (2001), and such events as the inauguration of the National Slavery Monument (2002) in Amsterdam’s Oosterpark8. Concurrently, the Dutch museological landscape began interrogating this, with greater intensity across the past decade, with museums of all kinds endeavouring to address western colonialism. For instance, the exhibition, Beyond the Dutch Indonesia, the Netherlands and the visuals arts from 1900 until now (2009) at the Centraal Museum, Utrecht analysed the cultural legacies of colonialism on both the Netherlands and Indonesia. This exhibition was an early attempt to discuss postcolonialism and create dialogue between Dutch and Indonesian artists. Historian and Anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler’s work is informative when we consider how museums engage with colonial history. She theorises how temporally post-colonial countries experience ‘aphasia’; a disconnect with their contested and dark histories. She argues, there is a “difficulty generating a vocabulary that associates appropriate words and concepts with appropriate things” (2011, 125). Therefore, this research explores why ethnographic museums, and in particular, why the four museums of National Museum of World Cultures in the Netherlands, have dealt with western colonial history and the colonial infrastructure, or the coloniality, of the museum through the act of inviting artists through commission and collecting contemporary art.
The museum is made up of four sites, Museum Volkenkunde in Leiden, Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam, the Afrika Museum in Berg en Dal and a partnership with Wereldmuseum Rotterdam.
6 Braudel’s, founder of the Annales school of historiography, 1949 book The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (English translation) distinguishes history into three compartments, economic and social trends, the ‘moyenne durée’; political military and culture trends as the ‘courte durée’ and finally, the longue durée.
7 Since 1993, this group gathered every year on June 30th in Amsterdam and July 1st in Rotterdam, catalysing the introduction of
Keti Koti in the Netherlands; the Day of Broken Chains, to commemorate the emancipation of enslaved people in the then Dutch West Indies on July 1st, 1863. See Kardux (2004). Or A.A. van Stipriaan Luiscius (2007), which traces the introduction of slavery
past into the Dutch historical canon.
8 Attended by Queen Beatrix, the Prime Minister and members of the Dutch cabinet, the crowds, of hundreds of Afro-Dutch people
in traditional Surinamese dress and a smaller group of white individuals, were separated from the inauguration itself by large black fences secured by police, instead made to watch on a large screen in another area of the park and only interact with the monument after the event. See Kardux (2004).
10 Each museum has its own unique history9 as institutions which collected through military and scholarship means (Leiden), trade and through private collections (Amsterdam and Rotterdam) and missionary projects (Berg en Dal); but today collections are shared, and exhibitions rotated across the sites. The positioning of these four museums under one governing umbrella organisation is young in origin, existing from 2014 onwards. This was due to the Dutch government in 2012 cutting funding to the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, which significantly changed the Dutch museum landscape. This also incurred a re-fashioning of the museums from ethnographic museums to be defined and termed, as one ‘World Culture’ museum. This renaming is part of an attempt to stray away from the colonial connotations which accompany ethnography and exemplifies a new era for the museum towards encompassing the museum for the people (Plankensteiner and Modest 2018). Likewise, the NMVW is no different with a mission of, ‘We are a museum about people’10. As well as a name change to detangle their colonial roots, museums with a focus on the ‘past’ have started to engage with the ‘modern’ and ‘contemporary’.
Contemporary Art Interventions in the Narratives of the Past
The NMVW museums provide thought-provoking case studies through which to explore contemporary artists interventions. The institution, particularly the Tropenmuseum has been instrumental in bringing contemporary artist into its walls, so much so that a Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art has been appointed since 201111. Robins (2013) is insightful in tracing the history of artist intervention in the museum space. She addresses how in the early 20th century artist interventions began as institutional and political critique within art history museums, for example through the Dadaist and Surrealist movements and the work of Marcel Duchamp, which rejected conventional European cultural and capitalist values. However, these interventions from the 1920s and 30s were not truly recognised in all their glory until the latter half of the 20th century. Robins writes, “such a rejection provides an historical model for using artwork as a form of critique that would be employed again and again at other junctures in the twentieth century” (2013, 49). Moving into the 1960s and 70s, in congruence with the changing social and cultural times, more radical interventions took place in the form of institutional critique. Here the focus was on “site specificity, contingency, audience response and interaction”, with interventions aimed at “curatorial strategies, display methodologies, exhibitions, funding policies and pedagogic approaches” (2013, 63). This time period was also defined by testing limits of interdisciplinary intermingling, where “art criticism, curating, investigative journalism and social science could all be confused with work that was 9 The Tropenmuseum, originally the Colonial Museum, was opened in 1871, began as a collection focussed on the Dutch overseas
territories, initiated by Frederik van Eeden who garnered donations from the public. See:
https://www.tropenmuseum.nl/en/themes/history-tropenmuseum. The Volkenkunde was established in 1837, making it one of the world’s oldest ethnographic museums. Originally named, the National Japanese Museum von Siebold, the collection consisted of objects collected by Philipp Franz von Siebold while stationed in the Dutch trading site, Deshima in Japan. See:
https://www.volkenkunde.nl/en/themes/history-museum-volkenkunde. Wereldmuseum, was founded in 1885 as part of the Vereeniging der Koninklijke Yachtclub members’ collection. In particular, Dr Elie van Rijckevorsel a collector of art and objects from Brazil, Indonesia and South Africa, set in motion the museum’s establishment. See:
https://www.wereldmuseum.nl/en/themes/history-wereldmuseum. Afrika Museum, is youngest in origin, established in 1954, by retired priest Father Piet Bukkems (1900-1970) of the Congregation of the Holy Spirit Catholic missionary, with a collection of objects from the African continent. See: https://www.afrikamuseum.nl/en/themes/history-africa-museum
10 View the mission of the Tropenmuseum, which is paralleled by Volkenkunde and the Afrika museum, here: https://www.tropenmuseum.nl/en/about-tropenmuseum/mission
11 Anke Bangma was the first curator responsible for Contemporary Art at the Tropenmuseum, officially, Curator of Photography
11 heralded as art in the 1970s” (2013, 66). Artist interventions adapted once more with a drastic shift in the 1990s ‘Memory Boom’ and absorption of postcolonial theory, towards critiquing the epistemology of museological practice itself. In this time, artist interventions moved beyond the art museum, to the science museum, natural history museum, local museum, privately houses museum, the ethnographic museum and so forth.
An early example of rethinking ethnographic collections which influenced the critical museum practices we see today, was the Magiciens de la Terre exhibition at the Centre Pompidou and Grande halle de la Villette by French curator and historian Jean-Hubert Martin in 198912. This exhibition, much like Wilson’s, was a commentary on Eurocentric interpretation in the museum. His work brought together artworks by contemporary artists from western and non-western contexts alike, to criticise the way western canonisation deems artwork from non-western cultures as ahistorical or ‘dead’ culture. He invites the clashing of cultures, by using pieces which might originally be put in an ethnographic museum together with pieces from the western canon deemed appropriate for the modern and contemporary art museum (Martin 1989). The bringing together of objects from across space and time like this has recently been approached by museums through the often-cited term ‘transhistorical’ curating. For example, the Frans Hals in Haarlem call themselves a Transhistorical Museum, since the merging of the contemporary art space, De Hof and the traditional works of the 17th century old masters found in De Hallen13 in 2018. The coalescing of old and new is argued as a method to transcend art historical boundaries of chronology and context and give space to look at objects and their associated narratives anew (Keller 2018). Whilst transhistoricity is not a focus of the World Culture museum, this research explores how contemporary art placed alongside the ethnographic collection demonstrates the bringing together of objects from transcultural and historical contexts.
Indeed, with Robins’ view of interventions as a means to incite change, this research also aims to interrogate the ‘intervention’ within the exhibition hall, and its various embodiments. With a focus on the use of contemporary art in conversation with historical objects, narratives and the canon, attention is given to how the artworks interrogate and coalesce with contested (hi)stories of colonialism and the colonial encounter. James Clifford in Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (1997) has influentially drawn on Anthropologist Mary Louis Pratt concept of the ‘contact zone’ to refer to how museums can be a space of activism, where multiple perspectives are mediated. Pratt’s notion of the contact zone describes the “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today’’ (Pratt 1991, 34). Clifford’s analogy has been prolific across studies into encounters between museums and particular cultural groups, where collaborations or interventions occur which catalyse new
12 See a lecture Magiciens de la Terre on by Jean-Hubert Martin in 2015 at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam of which Martin
references (at 58.30mins) the crisis of Ethnographic museums and efforts of the Tropenmuseum to renew perspectives through contemporary art. Available at, Forum: Global Collaborations Jean-Hubert Martin - 01-02-2015 at: https://vimeo.com/120565958
13 An example transhistorical curating at the Frans Hals museum’ can be found in a recent exhibition, The Grab Test by British
artist, and renowned intervener, Lubiana Himid. She spent time in the De Hallen collection of Frans Hals to create her own piece, relating to the Dutch textile industry in Indonesia and West Africa in reflection to the 17th Century Damasks in the collection, to be
12 interpretations or relationships14. When applying the contact zone, it is often to say the museum has developed into a site of discussion and a forum to try to resolve an imbalance of power discussed by Bennett, a notion which is explored further. Moreover, this kind of attention to the asymmetrical power relations is key to the postcolonial critique within academia, and in the work of postcolonial theory which informs the analysis of interventional artworks within the NMVW. This is because postcolonial theory calls for a critique of western dominating modes of knowledge production. To employ Said’s concept of Orientalism within western institutions, is to establish weakness into the foundations of the colonial project. One way in which to see this in the museum space, is the harnessing of those Other-ed voices narratives which sit at the periphery of the traditional museum; the fractured realities of the non-white Other which is left ignored and hidden from view by the stories of grandeur and national triumph from a White, Eurocentric worldview. This is because it is those who have been silenced which, when brought to light, challenge the hegemonic western tradition in the museum. Therefore, making space for Other-ed voices is integral to re-interpreting histories of colonialism. Dipesh Chakrabarty calls this act, ‘provincializing Europe’. Writing in the context of nationalist India, it is argued we must ‘provincialize’ hegemonic European knowledge production, and “make visible within the very structure of its narrative its repressive strategies” (2000, 388). This perhaps encourages a need for transparency within the museum, and an ability to call into question their own wrongdoings. Such a consideration is reflective of Eileen Hooper-Greenhill calls for museums to understand their ‘effective history’. Borrowing from Foucault in History of Archaeology, this is a history which acknowledges the presence of “discontinuity, rupture, displacement, and dispersion” (Foucault 1974, 4). Hooper-Greenhill brings this concept within the museum sphere, to encourage the institution to address the uneven historiographies or ‘histories of error’ and how this affects traditional museum practice. Therefore, this thesis is concerned with the ways that contemporary art and the insertion of contemporary artists gives room to criticism of the museum's own coloniality within its history and collection.
Case Studies
Conventionally, there is a huge variety of interactions between artists and museums. The most notable include artists in residency projects where artists are invited to collaborate with the museum’s collection to produce a commission. Comparably, museums simply purchase artwork from artists15. As with several of the artworks in this research, these collaborations are often with artists whose art can represent and speak to histories left unspoken in the museum, which subsequently challenge colonial histories of the museum or allow for the institution to address their own historical baggage. With regards to the NMVW, and in particular at the Tropenmuseum, their involvement with Roy Villevoye is noteworthy. In 2008, Villevoye produced a wax-figure of his Indonesian Papua friend
14 See Boast (2011), “Neocolonial Collaboration”, p. 58-60 for a summary into the Contact Zone in the museum
15 One recent example of contemporary art in ethnographic museums is the Royal Museum of Central Africa in Belgium. The
museum renovated in order to better interpret their colonial history, instating an artist residency programme and inviting Congolese artists to intervene in the museum. They acquired and exhibited works by Congolese artist Aimé Mpane, one of which exhibited in the Rotunda (once the entrance of the museum), a room which is adorned with bronze sculptures embedded in niches which originally was intended to impress visitors about Belgium’s ‘civilising mission’ in the Congo. His piece, entitled ‘New Breath or Burgeoning Congo’, has been placed on a pedestal in the middle of the room, as a way to juxtapose these offending statues. Mpane also collaborated with Belgium artist Jean Pierre Muller to create RE/STORE, sixteen semi-transparent veils placed over the existing 1920s bronze sculptures which tell the story of Leopold II’s colonial project. See: AfricaMuseum “Contemporary art in the
13 Omomá holding a white baby infant, representing the artist's daughter Céline titled Madonna (after Omomá and Céline). It was commissioned for the Detours (2008) exhibition at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen and was then purchased by the Tropenmuseum and can be seen to address the colonial heritage of the museum’s use of mannequins16. Recently, the museum purchased a vast painting by Indonesian artist Zico Albaiquni titled Ruwatan Tanah Air Beta, Reciting Rites in its Sites (2019), commissioned by the Framer Framed, Amsterdam as part of exhibition On the Nature of Botanical Gardens (2020), curated by Sadiah Boonstra. The vibrant landscape painting, amongst several references to environmental issues in Indonesia, deploys references to ‘Mooi Indië’ style painting of the 18th century which romanticises the Dutch colonial rule over Indonesia, its people and the landscape, and, according to Albaiquni, remains embedded within Indonesian art today17. The way this piece will be used in future exhibitions was the inspiration for this research, as its acquisition, within an ethnographic museum collection raises questions about the NMVW’s ability to exhibit the piece in ways which pay attention to its complexity and not only to serve a post-colonial or decolonial purpose. One could also postulate how its presentation might differ in a modern and contemporary museum setting. With Albaiquni’s artwork being very recent, this research will interrogate interventions from the recent past and present which address the histories and legacies of colonialism. The particular exhibitions chosen for this research all utilise contemporary art in different ways and consequently, we can draw out the ways these interventions of art bring about postcoloniality, intercept power structures and create meaningful change in the museum.
Specifically, What’s the Story at the Tropenmuseum, opened in April 2020 as a ‘permanent’18 exhibition outlining the 150-year long history of the museum as well as the Volkenkunde, and Afrika Museum19, with specific reference to the colonial origins of the museum and how this debate is still relevant contemporarily. It is a small exhibition but tries to answer questions significant to the problem of the coloniality of the ethnographic museums through two small showcases titled: Collecting Worldwide which displays pieces from varying geographies and A Current View of the Collection, which displays 15 objects to represent a collection overview. Africa Inspires at the Afrika Museum, established in November 2019 till 2024, encapsulates the new permanent display for the Afrika Museum and tries to accentuate the “diversity, dynamism and complexity of this continent”20 exploring the past, present and future and how Europe has been and still is, inextricably linked to the 54 countries which make up the African continent. Merging histories of migration and trade, as well as contemporary popular culture and design, the exhibition devotes significant space to both the ethnographic collection and contemporary African artists. Next, opening in September 2020 until 2028, Crossroads21 at the Wereldmuseum focusses on bringing the museum collection into the
16 Mannequins have a long history in the Tropenmuseum and their use in the world fairs has been under scrutiny. William
Westerkamp, curator of Southeast Asia at the NMVW, writes on the history of the use of mannequins stems from the first director, J.C. Van Eerde, who commissioned artist Kees Smout to construct the figures from plaster with moulds, measurements and photographs used to create them. See “Ethnicity or Culture: The Career of Mannequins in (Post) Colonial Displays” (2015)
17 See Framer Framed (2020), video interview with Albaiquni.27th March 2020. Available at: https://vimeo.com/401285205 18 According to Rik Herder, when an exhibition is termed permanent, this means around 7 years. With that being said, What’s the Story is in a movable condition, and therefore its lifespan is uncertain. See Appendix for conversation details with Herder.
19 The exhibition includes a large diagram to encapsulate the geographic expansion of the collection origins as well an indication of
the institutional predecessors of the Volkenkunde and Afrika Museum, giving the impression of ancienneté, See Fig. 14 Appendix
20Quote taken from the Afrika Museum’s description of the Africa Inspires exhibition, (Inspirerend Afrika in Dutch) found at: https://www.afrikamuseum.nl/en/whats-on/exhibitions/africa-museum-inspires
21 Exhibition, Crossroads (Kruispunt in Dutch), was opened on 4th September 2020 till 3rd September 2028, curators include
14 contemporary moment, showing how Rotterdam as a “city has always functioned to bring the world close to home, from the early trading expeditions of long ago to today when it is home to the world, numbering more than 170 different nationalities” 22; with the use of contemporary art of Rotterdammers who were inspired by the collections. Finally, First Americans, curated by NMVW Chief curator Henrietta Lidchi, opened in July 2020 and until July 2021 at the Volkenkunde, Leiden, as part of the Leiden400 project23, a collection of city-wide events which commemorated the presence of the Pilgrims in the Netherlands. The museum writes, “For our museum, taking a critical approach to Leiden400, First Americans presented an opportunity to reflect on temporality, sovereignty, futurism, resistance, resilience and community in contemporary Indigenous North America. Of the eighty works featured in the exhibition just under half are the work of contemporary living artists”24. Therefore, this mixing of contemporary with the ethnographic objects, and dedication to contemporary Indigenous North America, ensures this exhibition is a key site for the interrogation of contemporary art as an interloper in the presentation of colonial histories.
Each exhibition, except What’s the Story, includes a vast amount of artwork which could not all be addressed in this research. However, the contemporary art can be separated into two categories; the use of purchased art within the collection and the use of commissioned art specifically for the exhibitions explored. Distinguishing between these two types enables us to see the differing uses for contemporary art. In light of this, this research demonstrates how in every form, the contemporary art is used to allow the museum to attempt to break down traditional modes of museology.
Methodology
It is necessary to interrogate the museum, the exhibition and the art itself. Exhibition analysis using certain literary frameworks was undertaken during in-person visits to each exhibition. Anthropologist Stephanie Moser has created an intricate frame of analysis through which to deconstruct the exhibition layout, language, and setting. In the Devil is in the Detail, Moser (2010) offers a methodological framework to unpack the complex network of factors in the museum which have epistemological functions in the museum. Similarly, Cultural and Literary theorist Mieke Bal provides insight into the semiotic transfer of objects to signifiers in the museum space (1994), as well as an examination of self-reflectivity and self-awareness of the American Museum in New York (1992). In particular, she creates an awareness of the ability for objects to exist in assemblage to visual and textual aids, highlighting their ‘politics of transition’. This is a sign system between objects (the visual), and text (the verbal), which together produces certain knowledges, which enhances certain ideological views and obscures others. Consequently, this research pays attention to the ways that the art is placed in relation to the collection both physically in exhibition design choices, but also
22 Quote taken from Crossroads exhibition on the Wereldmuseum website: https://www.wereldmuseum.nl/en/whats-on-wereldmuseum/exhibitions/kruispunt-rotterdam
23Leiden 400 project is a set of events across the city of Leiden, to mark the 400 years since the Mayflower set sail for America. The
project unites 4 nations, ‘America, England, the Native Nations and the Netherlands’ with an aim to create an ‘international, inclusive commemoration’. See website: https://leiden400.nl/
24 Quote taken from webpage of RMCA Accommodating Strength Conversations Artists First Americans online webinar held on 18th
15 metaphysically, asking critical questions of how the artwork responds to colonialism, what the art is trying to do and say, and how the art interacts with the objects around it.
Furthermore, attention is given to the processes of accruing contemporary art and commissioning artists, and how this disrupts the normalised practice of colonial history telling, understood through conversations with museum staff. Discourse analysis has been undertaken into the literature surrounding artist institutional critique, transhistoricism, postcolonial and postmodern theoretical underpinnings in the museum, as well as artists’ own discourses surrounding partnerships in museums. A conversation with Roy Villevoye was insightful in gauging an awareness of the artists’ discourse within the ethnographic museum. As an experienced artist in this debate, he gave an introduction of the relationship between museum and artist and an awareness of the power dynamics at play. This research also turns to the public programming encircling the exhibition, analysing the ways the exhibition has been promoted and in what ways the museum tries to activate and stimulate a critical audience. Each chapter aims to cover different sub-questions within the aforementioned research question. Chapter 1 explores the contemporary art as a reflective intervention in criticising the coloniality of exhibition practice within the What’s the Story exhibition and Africa Inspires. Chapter 2 addresses the insertion of new narratives and multiple temporalities which contemporary art garners in the exhibitions First Americans and Crossroads, with questions of the transhistorical practices which obfuscate power relations between the institutional voice versus the artist’s voice. Finally, Chapter 3, contemplates the ways each contemporary artwork is part of the postcolonial and decolonial movement, asking how we can assess the durability of the intervention. This thesis concludes by acknowledging that NMVW museums must extend artists and their interventionist practices into the longue durée of the institutions, to become part of their very infrastructure.
16
Chapter 1
A Sign of the Times: Contemporary Art as an Interrogative Device into Colonial History and Colonial Exhibition Practice
A pair of golden glasses 25 sit alone behind a glass case of the Africa Inspires exhibition at the Afrika museum, with no name, date or origin; “the makers unknown”, speaks artist Onias Landveld in the audio guide. Here visitors are asked to contemplate how museums traditionally “used to collect art from African artists, without taking note of their names”, since “it wasn’t considered very important who had made them” due to a certain way of thinking which viewed “African art was more handicraft, than art”26. Such a display is reminiscent of the classic minimalist style found in modern and contemporary art museums, yet it sits within an ethnographic collection. Landveld’s words speak to the colonial rational deeply embedded within the collection practice which dominated much ethnographic museum practice until the 1970s. Hence, the golden glasses embody a way to view past museum practice. One could consider how this contemporary art goes beyond a simple educative device around African art, but instead, to question the very essence of collecting practice. Are we able to move away from the traditional modes of exhibiting which are predicated on colonial 25 With the object chosen to be unnamed and anonymous, the name ‘golden glasses’ is taken from the English audio guide
description given by Onias Landveld, See Appendix.
26 Ibid.
Figure 2: The glasses in their display case at the Afrika Museum, Berg en Dal. Inventory Number: WM-76692, origin: Ivory Coast. Courtesy of Marieke Meijer. January 2021.
17 rationalities? This chapter considers these questions through these ‘new’ objects within the case studies of the Afrika Museum’s Africa Inspires exhibition and the Tropenmuseum’s What’s the Story. The Africa Inspires dedicates significant space to the voices of contemporary artists. Comparably, What’s the Story’s, selectively utilises contemporary art pieces, alongside more ‘traditional’ objects in the NMVW collection. In particular, contemporary photography from Anouk Steketee’s ‘The Past Is a Foreign Country’ series (2012) is of interest, since it is placed alongside various pieces from the collection to formulate a vitrine titled A Current View in the Collection. This chapter will first explore the violence enacted through collecting, in both the traditional ethnographic collection and the new methods of contemporary collecting. Following this, the inherent coloniality of the museum is explored, with final considerations toward the ability of art to embody interventionist projects. It will be shown that the contemporary art in the exhibitions is used to invoke moments of reflection on the intellectual colonial rational within ethnography and the museum itself. Thus, the use of the artworks to enact such reflexivity, demonstrates an outsourcing of critical thinking.
Collecting as Violence: The Practice of Colonial Collecting in Museums
The golden glasses spark a turning point of the Africa Inspires exhibition where the visitor enters a final room devoted solely to contemporary art, titled Makers in the Picture. In this particular showcase ‘An Ode to the Anonymous Artist’, the visitor learns via the audio of Landveld that this mode of displaying African art as anonymous handicraft has since changed;
“Museums, artists and visitors find it important to know who made what and where it came from. African artists now sign their artwork too. In this section of the exhibition, you can see work by leading artists.”
Landveld highlights here an implicit commentary on the practice of collecting in the museum, more specifically the ethnographic World Culture museum. The certain ‘viewpoint’ Landveld refers to Enlightenment thinking which installed a colonial logic of racial science and Manichean divisions between white vs non-white and good vs evil. Subsequently, non-western artworks were deemed handicraft and not worthy of placement in such renowned ‘high-class’ art museums as the Rijksmuseum or Paris’ Louvre and collected in ethnographic museums, where facets such as its maker and meaning were of lesser importance. Such manipulations of object meanings furthered the colonial rational with a thriving European world imagined through the ahistorical construction of an Other (Said 1978). This is because, as Jan Nederveen Pieterse notes, when objects are viewed and displayed as ‘primitive handicrafts’, these cultures are epitomised as “without momentum” and consequently “judged inferior to the standards set by Europe'' (1997,95). Therefore, the exhibition’s ‘anonymous artists’ makes the visitor aware of how collecting stagnates certain cultures as part of a tradition for ethnographic museums. Cultural and Literary theorist, Mieke Bal queries the notion of collecting through addressing the semiotic transfer of objects to signifiers in the museum space. Bal argues once an object enters the museum collection, it is stripped of its original function and purpose. She writes objects are “turned away, abducted, from itself, its inherent value” and “their status is turned from objective to semiotic, from thing to sign'' (1994,97). This demonstrates a violence enacted on objects when collected. In the case of the Afrika Museum, it seems the golden glasses alongside Landveld’s audio and the information panel are used to accentuate and reject the ‘old’ way of
18 displaying artefacts from Africa merely as a signifier of the particular country the object derives from, or in some cases simply the African continent as a whole. This highlights a wider discriminative trend of viewing the continent as one homogenous entity, ignoring the 54 countries in the region and vast cultural differences found across these.
However, the secretive nature surrounding the golden glasses which enables such an acknowledgement of the colonial nature of collecting is diminished after considering how the artwork sits within the museum infrastructure of the museum archive. The information panel references how African art was not signed as it was not part of the custom to do so, yet it is a key aspect of the western art world, with all artists in the international art market signing their work in order to gain personal recognition. Here, the golden glasses criticise the western colonial epistemologies which designates the valuation of objects. Western ways of seeing the world still dominate today and whilst the artwork is being used here to convey to the visitor the arbitrary meanings associated with certain objects in the museum, this does not mean it is free from these power relations. When we refer to the NMVW database, there remains a colonial view of categorising objects and compartmentalising the world. Ann Laura Stoler’s work on the archive is influential with her postulation of the archive as embedded within a colonial infrastructure, arguing “what constitutes the archive, what form it takes, and what systems of classification and epistemology signal at specific times are (and reflect) critical features of colonial politics and state power” (2002,87). Her paper Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance calls for an investigation into the ‘archive as subject’, a site of knowledge production and therefore it is necessary to read within and around the archive or ‘along the grain’ (2002). Consequently, the digital archive of the NMVW database becomes a site to interrogate the dominating worldviews placed onto the contemporary art. Already the mystery of the object has been somewhat weakened when we see the objects origin from the Ivory Coast and it’s archival number WM-7669 on the showcase and once inputted into the online database, further metadata is visible. The artwork is compartmentalised following the systematic categories of the database, Culture, Origin, Subcollection and Keywords; a system which allows for objects to be grouped and understood in a
Figure 3: Screenshot of the golden glasses archival entry in the NMVW collection online archive. At:
19 particular way. Robin Boast, in Neocolonial Collaboration: Museum as Contact Zone Revisited, argues these categories are limiting since they “constantly generalizes, constantly summarizes, constantly standardizes” (2011,65). Much like the arguments of Bal regarding collecting as stripping the object, it is these categorisations which also homogenise and enact violence onto the object. Whilst old ways of museology encouraged a lack of understanding around African objects, the artwork here is still subjected to the same value systems which determined anonymity of the African maker remains out of the picture.
It is not a new phenomenon to question the neutrality of the archive, with Foucault’s 1980 study of the Power/Knowledge complex contemplates the archive as a dispositif; defining this as “a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws [...] in short, the said as much as the unsaid'' (1980,194). Therefore, the archive delineates the possibilities of what can be and what cannot be. Foucault determines ‘regimes of truth’, which renders the world intelligible through certain value systems, or ‘grids of intelligibility’ (1980). Once something is intelligible through a particular worldview, it becomes controllable. In fact, Stoler argues it is this “authority to designate what would count as reason and reasonable” which was “colonialism’s most insidious and effective technology of rule” (2010, 57). In the case of the museum archive, the way we comprehend the golden glasses cannot be separated from the ontology of the archival classification system. An ontology which has been realised through a western centric view of the world. Subsequently, the ability for the artwork to transcend the traditional colonial collecting practice outlined in the audio guide, is undermined when we consider the intelligibility of what can and cannot be instilled in the archive.
Comparably, the exhibition What’s the Story at the Tropenmuseum outlines significant facets of the museum’s history since its origin in 1871 as the Colonial Institute and therefore makes manifest the colonial epistemologies of its collection and display practices. The use of the Anouk Steketee artwork does not create a moment of reflection as seen in the Afrika Museum, rather, it is a signifier of the diversification of the collecting practices. The artwork sits in a large vitrine amongst 15 objects, all of which are used to explain the questions or provocative statements encircling the room, for instance ‘Exhibiting Human Remains’ or ‘Returning Stolen Art’. This accentuation of certain topics as focal points outlines to the viewer the most pressing concerns related to the museum’s controversial past and the ‘decolonial’ movement which museums are continuing27, as well as the traditional methods of display which stem from the colonial project. For instance, an Alpaca Statue and ‘a trendy bag’ are used to discuss the question, ‘Craftmanship or Design?’. The contemporary artwork of interest is Ryfki from Surabaya, which is part of a commissioned photographic series The Past Is a Foreign Country (2012) for the museum, on the topic of the Indonesia historical canon and the remembrance of the colonial past. The title of the series parallels the book The Past Is a Foreign Country (1985) by David Lowenthal, which explores how societies treat and understand the past, with a focus on how the past is constructed and appropriated but also distanced from societies. Since 2000 there has been growing interest in Indonesia around its shared colonial history with the Netherlands, with Steketee investigating a popular pastime called ‘Plesiran Tempo Doeloe', which
27 The NMVW has engaged with ‘decolonising’ museum movement for many years, collaborating with the #DecoloniseTheMuseum
20 involves heritage walking or cycling tours on old bikes past colonial buildings. She contrasted this with the locations of “painful memories of colonial struggles and atrocities…in order to show how complex and contradictory the image of the Dutch colonial heritages is”28. Tempo Doeloe is a term used to discuss the nostalgia for the ‘good old days’ within the Netherlands, a yearning for the life of the Dutch East Indies; whilst ‘plesiran’, translates to ‘tourism’ in Indonesian29.
The artwork’s position, resting within the vitrine of 15 other objects, exemplifies how the artwork becomes part of an assemblage which embodies the Current View of the Collection as communicated in the showcase title. The object is used to convey how the NMVW collection goes beyond traditional objects of the ethnographic museum. For years the museum has been collecting contemporary objects, for instance, the exhibition notes how objects from the Hong Kong protests in 2020 were collected. In this sense, the museum is shifting its role as merely an ethnographic museum but rather embodying world cultures past, present and future. This ‘recent’ collecting practice can be seen worldwide today, with such exhibitions as the V&A Rapid Response Collection30, which collects newsworthy objects from the contemporary moment to be displayed alongside one another in the museum. From the seemingly mundane pair of jeans to the political pink beanies worn in the Women’s #MeToo marches; 28 Taken from Ryfki from Surabaya description on the NMVW collection website, available at: www.collectie.wereldculturen.nl. 29For more information on Plesiran Tempo Doeloe see, Remco Raben ‘s “Postkoloniale saturnaliën” article on at: https://www.de-gids.nl/artikelen/postkoloniale-saturnalien Or Yatun Sastramidjaja article, “Playing with the Past” at:
https://www.insideindonesia.org/playing-with-the-past
30 V&A in London have been ‘rapid response collecting’ since 2014, as a response to major events occurring in the contemporary
moment, they write, “any of the objects have been newsworthy either because they advance what design can do, or because they reveal truths about how we live”. Quote from, https://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/rapid-response-collecting
Figure 4: Photograph of the 'Current View of the Collection' vitrine of the What's the Story (2020) exhibition at the Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam. (Authors own image, 4.10.2020)
21 these ‘new’ items into the museum complicates the practice of collecting. It means we are collecting today without a retrospective angle of what is important, consequently shaping what is significant to our history before it is even history. Of course, the V&A is a design museum, but when thinking about rapid response in the World Culture museum, is it interesting to consider how the objects reappraise and reconstruct the museum’s identity and mission. The premise of moving the new into the traditionally old museum shifts the understanding of the museum as solely placed in the past. Regarding the contemporary artwork of Ryfki, which also sits under the umbrella of ‘new’ collecting, there is seemingly very little written for the artwork itself and it is not clear that Steketee’s series was a commission by the museum. Rather, it is now separated and appropriated for this exhibition. Moreover, the original meanings behind the artwork have too been re-established and constructed in order to become a token or signifier for the contemporary art of the NMVW’s now diversified collection, conveying the message the museum is contemplating their colonial past.
With this tokenising in mind, one could argue there is a more superficial engagement with the artwork itself and more emphasis on what the artwork gives to the exhibition as a modern contemporary artwork. In light of Bal’s violence of collecting, the use of both artworks elaborates on the arbitrary nature of collecting. The golden glasses provide a view of the past and the Afrika Museum shift away from a practice of tokenising African Art as anonymous insignificant handicraft. Similarly, the simple act of placing Steketee’s artwork into a vitrine under the title Current View of the Collection is performative of the diverse collection under the NMVW and strips the artwork from its original commission and purpose. Considering both pieces here in the broader context of the NMVW archive, we see the categorisations placed onto the objects according to a specific logic of intelligibility. Subsequently, they no longer serve an artistic purpose but the museum’s intentions. Seeing Coloniality through Contradictions, Subversions and Ambivalences
Ryfki from Surabaya is also laden with multiple lenses through which we can see the coloniality inherent to the museum collection and history. Here we can refer to the series title and Lowenthal’s book, The Past is a Foreign Country (1985). The notion of a country’s history as recognised as alien parallels representations of western colonialism, when we consider the ways certain areas of the past, in particular the darker colonial histories, have been left out of the history books and museum halls for so many decades. This phenomenon is emblematic of Stoler’s concept of ‘aphasia’, which is not only a case of removing parts of history out of view, but an inability to discuss verbally the colonial narrative. Perhaps it is the complexity of the past which Steketee is acknowledging in her artwork which lends itself to the aphasic condition. It is messy and wrought with contradictions and therefore putting words to things becomes challenging. Paul Bijl has written extensively on cultural memory of Indonesia and the Netherlands. In congruence to Stoler’s aphasia, he argues undesirable parts of colonisation are “again and again experienced as ‘absent’, from the national past” (2012,441). Using Judith Butler’s notion of memorability, Bijl further notes the “Dutch perpetratorship” is not recognised in the dominant national remembrance frameworks, as it is something undesirable to remember, causing a failure to appropriately frame the dark sides of Dutch history (2012,450). By placing the imagery of citizens enacting Plesiran Tempo Doeloe alongside locations fraught with painful memories, Steketee merges the undesirable into something seemingly playful. More importantly, with these scenes are now brought into the Dutch museum sphere, one
22 could argue the museum is using Steketee’s photography to address this aphasia by inserting a narrative often absent from the nation’s historical narrative.
Moreover, looking at the artwork’s placement in the exhibition, it is used as the focal point for a discussion into ‘Decolonisation?’. The text panel writes:
“the Tropenmuseum was founded as a demonstration of colonial power. The aim was to spread knowledge and promote the commercial opportunities offered by Indonesia, Surinam, and the former Dutch Antilles. Photography contributed to the stereotypical image of the colonies; the Dutch were often portrayed in superior positions. Today’s photography can help change that image.Anouk Steketee’s photographs, for instance illustrate the complexity and contradictory image of the colonial history in Indonesia itself”
This is perhaps a generalisation of the complexity around the museum’s involvement as a colonial institution. Indeed, the museum’s function encompassed the dissemination of knowledge, however the iteration of such business terms surrounding the western colonial project neglects the entirety of the Dutch actions overseas. Despite this, the text panel does refer to the role of photography in the colonial project. This allows a comparison to be made to the way the golden glasses encourage the viewer to consider the traditional museum collecting practice. Both artworks are used here to look beyond traditional ways of looking at the world. Colonial photography from the past 200 years not only provides a lens through which we can view the past, but also plays a vast role in performative memory work (Marselis 2017). A photograph, argued by Elizabeth Edwards, is a “a site of
Figure 5: Photograph of 'Ryfki from Surabaya' (2012) by Anouk Steketee (1974), in What's the Story (2020), Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam. Inventory number: TM-6479-12 (Author's own image, 4.10.2020).
23 intersecting histories - the visual legacy and historical deposits of sets of encounters and relationships” (2003,83). Such an encounter can be found in the photographic archive of the NMVW. For instance, Figure 6 shows two images from the NMVW collection where a clear hierarchical relationship is detected on the surface. One can clearly recognise the power relations within the image, with the Dutch colonial officers in their familiar white clothing and pith helmet, standing or raised above the Indonesian men and women whilst at work. This was not accidental, but rather a common positioning of coloniser and colonised in photography, to physically and socially convey the order of hierarchies at play. Susan Legêne, professor of Political History argues photographs were used as “monologues for colonialists” (2007,226). With the focus placed on the central Dutch officers and the Indonesian worker marginalised to the side, both images exemplify a colonial gaze; a gaze which according to Said, has been present within western canons of literature, cinema and art for centuries. As aforementioned, his concept of the orientalist lens highlights the ways a colonial rational from the West inscribes power over the East. It is this infrastructure built into 19th and 20th century photography found in the archives, which is performative of a colonial imaginary and designates a superior Us and an inferior Other. Images from the colonies were reproduced on a mass scale as photographs to be sold as souvenirs or shown in World Fairs, to ground this imaginary as reality to those back in the Dutch Motherland in Europe. Therefore, to use Legêne’s understanding of photographs, these images are performative of monolithic narratives of the Dutch perspective.
Moreover, the power of colonial photography described here corresponds with Tony Bennett’s elaboration of the governmentalising power of the museum. In his reprise of the Exhibitionary Complex (EC) in the paper, Thinking (with) museums: From Exhibitionary Complex to Governmental Assemblage, Bennett considers how the Exhibitionary Complex can be built upon and departed from, to extended outwards beyond museum walls, through what he terms, ‘governmental assemblages’. Bennett uses this term to explain how museums are imbricated in governance beyond their institutional infrastructure and into the public sphere. Building upon Deleuzian and Latourian theories of assemblage and its use in socio-cultural analysis, Bennett, postulates the assemblage as “on the one hand, “a machinic assemblage” of bodies and things, and, Figure 6: Two photographs taken from the NMVW Collection online archive. Left: Tobacco sorting shed in Indonesia: Mr. Jean Demmeni (1866-1939), RV-A5-3-47 (ca.1913) Right: Bekioen tobacco plantation. GR Lambert & Co (1867-1918), TM-60001824 (1885-91). At: https://collectie.wereldculturen.nl/ (accessed 11.10.2020)
24 on the other, “a collective assemblage of enunciation, of acts and statements'' (citing Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 88; 2015, 14). Moreover, Bennett considers how the assemblage compares to Foucault’s dispositif, in its encapsulation of heterogeneous elements which, in relation to the Exhibitionary Complex, interprets the museum space as “sites where texts, things, technologies, and bodies are brought together in complex relations with one another'' (2015, 15). In his assertions of assemblage into governance practices, he argues museums must not be considered as a “self-contained knowledge/power apparatuses'', but, in line with colonial practices, be understood as “switch points in the circuits through which knowledges are produced and circulated through different networks” (2015, 16). Bennett elaborates through the example of expeditions in Australia which, alongside the museum archival and categorisations systems, embedded a rhetoric of racial difference between ‘white’ Australia and Indigenous Aboriginal populations through ‘civilising programmes’. He argues this is representative of how knowledge flows through the museum, into the anthropological field and expeditions and “back into the museum as a center of collections and calculations, a place of ordering, translating it into other forms so that it becomes capable of acting back on the world” (2015, 16). Subsequently, the museum must not be overlooked for the ability to enact power across multiple assemblages. Therefore, the dissemination of knowledge and promotion of commercial activities which are part of the ‘demonstration of colonial power’ which founded the Tropenmuseum, must be acknowledged as part of the governmentalising of the public carried out by the museum. The cementing of the ‘stereotypical image of the colonies’ is not only performed through colonial photography found in archives but extends outside museum walls to the colony itself. For example, through the Ethical Policy of 1900-1943, a covertly colonial civilising mission within the Dutch East Indies31.
Additionally, the display panel acknowledges the ability for contemporary photography to destabilize the power of colonial photography32. Is it the presence of Steketee’s work which will do this? If so, how? Perhaps in line with Bennett, the use of Steketee’s series is a mode of subverting the traditional gaze from colonial photography. Her photography complicates the historical narrative and the colonial encounter by informing a new perspective on past colonial life and the postcolonial present, a perspective which shatters the lens through which old colonial imagery was presented to the world. This is because, when compared with older photography in the NMVW archive, two distinct figures of the coloniser and colonised are not present. Rather, Ryfki from Surabaya depicts Ryfki, an Indonesian man, dressed as a Dutch officer in white colonial clothing and a pith helmet amongst an unknown scene in Surabaya. This creates an ambivalent representation where coloniser and colonised are blurred and accentuates the complexities of this history, with multiple identities and historical perspectives coalescing at one point. When the boundaries of coloniser and colonised is blurred in such a way, postcolonial thinkers have referred to concepts such as hybridity to understand the ways colonialism has altered and transformed cultures, identities, literature, religion and more. Paul Gilroy in The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), argued 31 The Ethical Policy was a (colonial) modernisation project in the Dutch East Indies set in motion in 1901 by Queen Wilhelmina. It
involved an increase in welfare and educational policies, city and infrastructure planning, all justified through enlightenment ideals and a colonial civilising project. During this time, the collecting of Indonesian material culture grew significantly. See S. Legene (2007) for a detailed elaboration into the Tropenmuseum’s influence on the Ethical Policy.
32 The RMCA has several external research programmes with a focus on colonial photography within the NMVW’s archive, for
instance; Returning Photos: Australian Aboriginal Photographs from European Collections, which, alongside four international museums, has a mission to make the multitude of collections of Aboriginal photographs accessible to Aboriginal communities seeking their heritage. Read more at: https://www.materialculture.nl/en/research/projects/globalisation-photography-and-race
