Decolonising Amsterdam Museum: Why Symbolic Change is Doing the Work
This article is the first in a three-part series on the black sculptor Nelson Carrilho. The artist recently contributed to an exhibition at Amsterdam Museum which has been hotly debated in the media because it features a controversial colonial artefact belonging to the Dutch royal family. Decolonising story-telling and history writing practices, a crucial but tricky endeavour, turns museums into a powerful tool to instigate societal change.
On the 18th of June, the Amsterdam Museum unveiled its highly-anticipated exhibition The Golden Coach, displaying a carriage that was gifted to the young Queen Wilhelmina by the city of Amsterdam in 1898, on the occasion of her inauguration. If you had asked me about it five years ago, I would have said it was a beloved icon of the Dutch royal family, controversial only to those who don’t support the monarchy. What I didn’t know is that the Golden Coach is a symbol of oppression, not only because it represents the inherited wealth, power and status of the royal family, but because the painted side-panels of the carriage depict people from the Dutch colonies, scarcely clothed and in lowly positions, paying tribute to a white woman who personifies The Netherlands. Like many (white) Dutch people, I have since become aware of the Tribute from the Colonies panel, and now feel deeply conflicted. As an art history student and an aspiring curator, I fundamentally believe in the preservation of cultural heritage. But traditions change: it is time to retire the carriage and let it become a reminder that The Netherlands need to face up to their colonial history and its legacy which persists to this day. Let the Golden Coach become an emblem of this ongoing conversation — that, at least, is what the exhibition seeks to achieve. The curators strove to address the multiple meanings of the carriage and invited sixteen artists from different backgrounds to display original artworks contextualising the Golden Coach. In addition, the museum developed an extensive public outreach program and consulted with a panel of experts, artists, and activists throughout the development of the exhibition, in order to create a polyphonous narrative.
This is an exhibition about foreign royal paraphernalia, from a small museum in a small country, so why is it significant? Because it is the result of a recent shift of consciousness, an urgent call to decolonise which is finally being heard in museums who mostly dismissed the problem before. This is a museum revolution, if you will. Decolonisation means to address the colonial practice of a museum by reconsidering language use, redressing gaps in museum collections, retelling history — and ideally, to become an anti-racist, anti-colonial institution. There is enormous potential for systemic change if museums address the makeup of their direction and management, but decolonising endeavours often lack in that department. Nevertheless, it is worth noting what is happening in The Netherlands. In March of 2020, thirteen national museums put their heads together and launched the initiative Musea Bekennen Kleur (Museums Acknowledge Colour). By establishing an advisory board of experts, developing exhibitions, fostering conversations, creating an educational program for schools, and hosting an international symposium in 2022, they seek to make Dutch cultural heritage institutions diverse and inclusive. Twenty more museums have joined the movement since. This is not an isolated incident: it is happening in museums across the Global North, most of whom are embedded in an enduring legacy of colonialism. It isn’t a new phenomenon either — activists have been calling attention to decolonising museums for decades. Unfortunately, their calls remained a push from the outside in and few museums answered until recently, in response to the wave of Black Lives Matter protests which swept the world last Spring.
In a speed-driven turnaround, black and indigenous artists are now widely being asked to help, to take part, to share their perspectives. Exploiting their pain and their emotional labour under the guise of ‘inclusion’ is problematic, however. One of the artists commissioned for the exhibition, the black sculptor Nelson Carrilho, contributed a piece which is an ode to this great grandmother, who was displayed as a human exhibit in the International Colonial and Export Exhibition of 1883 in Amsterdam. We recently spoke and Carrilho explained to me that his sculpture showcases a personal story that brings distant concepts closer to home. Based on his personal experience, being colonised is having your language, religion and culture stripped from you, yet put on display when it suits. Being colonised is having your protests ignored and your experience written out of history, not just in the past but in the present. Carrilho was most keen to make the public understand that it is not up to people from former colonies to fix this. While they have been dismantling systemic racism and oppression for a long time, this is a common contemporary problem and we all have to take part and face the discomfort.
Is an exhibition, or even a string of exhibitions, enough to address centuries-old injustice? Isn’t this an example of superficial virtue-signaling to avoid doing the real, difficult work? There is much to criticise about the Golden Coach exhibition. The language of its press release is relatively neutral and distant, which makes it sound hypocritical: in its underscoring of nuance and multiplicity, Amsterdam Museum clearly seems afraid of backlash. Presenting different perspectives is important, but this is not a case where ‘both sides of the argument are valid’ and museums need to take a political stance — they never were and cannot be neutral environments. Sadly, our society is still facing up to its past, still unlearning colonial narratives and excuses. Despite all I heard from Carrilho and all I have read in the past year, I find myself defending museums and their tentative steps, their trial-and-error approach to decolonisation. In my view, Amsterdam Museum is being brave, especially in the face of the financial consequences of the pandemic, which took a heavy toll on the cultural heritage industry. Museums, after all, are dependent on government funding and visitor attendance — they cannot suddenly alienate their audiences, which are largely white, middle-class and middle-aged. And they are entrenched in a culture of white supremacy which will not be easily overturned, because it requires self-reflection and vulnerability.
What we are seeing at the moment is that museums are playing catch-up to society: as the caretakers of national collections for the benefit of the public, they must answer to society and its calls. They are also sites of power and authority, which shape discourses around our nationhood, and thereby our cultural imagination. If, and when, they embrace this, they can become agents of change at an institutional, systemic level. I am hopeful because Musea Bekennen Kleur represents an attempt to take action from the inside. There is potential here, especially if other museums in the Global North take notice and benefit from the knowledge gained in their learning process. In 2017, for example, the Dutch National Museum of World Cultures published Words Matter: An Unfinished Guide to Word Choice in the Museum Sector. This booklet is the result of the museum’s long-term decolonisation project and was released both in Dutch and in English, to be used by museum professionals across the world. What Dutch museums understand is that sharing resources and expertise is crucial; there is no point in taking an isolationist approach because racism doesn’t stop at national borders, and the colonial project was a joint endeavour to begin with.
Of course, there is always the risk that these are empty statements and symbolic, tokenistic changes — but behind the scenes, hard questions are being asked and difficult conversations breached. As of 2019, Amsterdam Museum has stopped using the term ‘Golden Age’ to refer to the 17th century in The Netherlands, in acknowledgement of the fact that this expression reflects only the experience of white colonisers and presents a sanitised, exclusionary view of history. It remains a controversial decision and prominent politicians, including the Dutch Minister for Culture, condemned it because you ‘cannot rewrite history’. I would argue that museums can, and should. History, after all, is subjective storytelling based on a selection of facts and testimonies. Rewriting history simply means to include different testimonies and reflecting the experiences of those who have been written out of it. During our conversation, Carrilho stated that museums are only changing symbols and that the real issues — such as imperialism written in the law — aren’t being addressed. To that I would say yes, this is symbolic, not systemic change. But symbols are the purview of museums: symbols shape our (sub)consciousness and museums are where we go to reinforce our sense of self. If our symbols reflect broader experiences, more people will see themselves represented in museums and those who already saw themselves will be forced to share those spaces. Change is slow. Too slow, and reactive rather than proactive, fuelled by outsiders who have been calling for change for decades and whose labour is hardly credited today, but perhaps we are finally doing the work. Only time will tell.
