In a time where ‘Black Lives Matter’-protests have revived and structural racism is being rightfully denounced, the relevance of the temporary exhibition ‘HERE. Black in Rembrandts time’ is undeniable. This exhibition by Elmer Kolfin and Stephanie Archangel in the Rembrandt house museum, focuses on the presentation of black people in the seventeenth century and wants to shift the attention […]
Category: Blog
‘Fuk the Police’ – The history you probably didn’t listen to
Mind your language A black man killed by a police officer. Were you shocked after reading the previous sentence? Probably not. Nothing new, right? Last year, in 2019, 250,52 million residents of the United States of America were white. 370 were shot to death by the police. That’s 0.000148%. In the same year 44,08 million […]
Analysis: HIER. Zwart in Rembrandts tijd
The exhibition ‘HIER. Zwart in Rembrandts tijd’ was presented in The Rembrandthuis from 6 March until 11 September 2020. The funding was done by Fonds 21, The Mondriaan Fonds, The Prins Bernard Cultuurfonds, Ten Hagen Fonds, VSBfonds and the Nachenius Tjeenk Stichting. Originally the exhibition was scheduled until the 31st of May, but due to […]
Mapping Slavery – are you living next to a plantation owner?
It looks just like a regular old house in Leiden, the house on the Oude Singel 118. Maybe a bit bigger and more decorated than its neighbours, though nothing special for a house in the once thriving city of Leiden. I must have passed it many times without noticing it. But this particular house does […]
Bottom-up History – Stories from the Streets
Have you ever wandered through the Amsterdam Red Light District and wondered how these people came to work there? Or maybe you have felt hesitant to approach a homeless person in your city even though their story intrigues you. This interest in life at the bottom of the social ladder is completely normal, since it […]
Afterlives of slavery – a small exhibition with a big impact.
‘Can the Tropenmuseum ever really be decolonized, being a former colonial institute?’, asks Mitchell Esajas himself in his reflection about the exhibition ‘Afterlives of Slavery’ – a semi permanent exhibition that opened in 2017 and is currently still open in the Tropenmuseum till the end of 2020. In the fall of 2017 25.000 people visited […]
Zonnestraal, ship on the heath
In 1924 Thomas Mann published his novel The Magic Mountain: a masterpiece about medicine, death and disease. The story centers on the experiences of Hans Castorp, a young bourgeois German, at a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps. The book has had me in its tight grip ever since I bought it in 2015 and with […]
Whose museum? The benefit of anatomical museums to society
Because of their long history, most anatomical museums slowly transformed into museums of the history of anatomy. By displaying their collections the original way, visitors can learn how people thought of these specimen in the past. The anatomical collection of the Museum of Anatomy and Pathology in Radboud UMC is different. They only started collecting […]
Monster or Marvel? – A Reflection on the Teratological Exhibition in Nijmegen
As Lucas Boer walks us through the Museum of Anatomy and Pathology in Nijmegen, sporadically stopping to tap on one of the many containers with human remains in them to get the air-bubbles out, he tells us about the way he designed the exhibition. It is obvious he spent a lot of time thinking about […]
Afterlives of Slavery – “This is your history too!”
In October 2017 the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam opened a small exhibition about the Dutch history of slavery. The exhibition is not just about the past though. “Afterlives of Slavery” connects the history of slavery with the present. After all, the colonial history doesn’t end with the abolition of slavery. Up until today people face racism […]