‘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 […]
Tag: public history
Funeral museum Tot Zover is all but dead and buried
How do we deal with death? That is what it is all about at the Tot Zover museum located at ‘De Nieuwe Ooster’ graveyard in Amsterdam. The Funeral museum Tot Zover is celebrated because of its very unique concept and location. To wit, the museum houses itself in the former residence of the graveyard director/undertaker. […]
Bleuland’s babies in bottles
“Quiver with horror at skeletons, organs, foetuses and body parts in formaldehyde!” This caption at the website of the Utrecht University Museum refers to the Bleuland Cabinet, home of the private collection of physician Jan Bleuland (1756-1838). Bleuland lived in an age of change. The development of instruments and technics, in which the physician himself […]
Harnessing the power of history
‘How can the past be of practical value in the present?’ It’s a question we historians hear very often. Well, I could argue ‘of very practical value’, but it’s easier to show that significance by introducing you to the International Coalition of Historic Site Museums of Conscience. Ruth J. Abram, the president and founder of the […]
Gazing at the Rijksmuseum
I think I had to read Decoding the Visitor’s Gaze at least four times before starting to get a sense of what the chapter by Gordon Fyfe and Max Ross is actually about. And even now, I’m not sure whether I understand what their findings truly entail. But I’ll give it a go anyways. In […]
Anti-labeling-campaign gone bad
‘Oh my god, are they really kissing?!’ my roommate was pointing at her phone whilst excitingly dangling the image in front of my eyes. I recognized two famous Dutch vloggers, Monica Geuze and Anna Nooshin, who were intimately posing on the cover of the magazine LINDA.meiden (a magazine for teenage girls). Only a few minutes […]
Out of the closet and into the museum
By Annabel de Ruijter – Cultural institutions often embody the public sphere, central sites where the display of sexual objects becomes a stage for debates over how and when the erotic is illicit. In “When the erotic becomes illicit. Struggles over displaying queer history at a mainstream museum”, Jill Austin et al. explore how the Chicago […]
The Proactive Museum and the Public
By Circe de Bruin The nature of the decision-making process conducted for an museum exhibition has changed, observes Mark Liddiard in his essay “Changing Histories: museums, sexuality and the future of the past”. Based on interviews with staff and visitors of local, national and independent museums in the UK he describes the following trend: […]
Sex Sells
By Kevin Schram Sexuality in museums. A topic discussed in the last part of Mark Liddiards research essay ‘Changing Histories: Museums, Sexuality and the Future of the Past’ on the changes occurring in museums, concerning technologies and attitudes towards the past. He argues that questions should be asked about the identity and direction of museums […]
Let’s get physical.
‘The real other? Museum objects in digital contact networks’ by C. Hogsden and E.K. Poulter In ‘The real other? Museum objects in digital contact networks’ Hogdsen and Poulter go into the idea of virtually portraying objects in museums and beyond the borders of museums. Using examples of projects at the University of Cambridge Museum of Archeology […]