After Valkenburg

photography by Jens Ziehe

What does it mean to inherit the wealth amassed by making people into property? Dutch identity and self-conception have, for centuries, been founded on unacknowledged colonial exploitation and slavery. Visual culture played a key role in engraining the values underlaying the colonial project. In the present moment, following a period of apologies, Dutch civil society more readily acknowledges the cruelty and extractiveness that mark the colonial past. Similarly, in what Ciraj Rassool calls the “restitutionary moment”, those institutions that are charged with “caring” for colonial art and material culture are more actively engaged in the questions of return and repair. But what does this inheritance, and the role it played in shaping visual culture through the centuries, demand from these institutions beyond “mere” acknowledgement? How do the disciplines that were complicit in rendering colonial oppression as natural—even desirable—for the opulent fruits it yielded, need to shift their foundational ideas? Which strategies are being mobilised to make visible erased worlds, to reframe what life looked like under colonialism and slavery and hold the present to account for its unjust roots? 

Willem de Rooij’s installation Valkenburg (on display until 25 January) at Centraal Museum Utrecht dissects how eighteenth Century painting promoted colonial values. It is the culmination of many years of work on the Dutch artist Dirk Valkenburg, and focuses on the entanglements of seventeenth century Dutch art with colonialism and slavery. On January 19, as part of the series of events around the exhibition, the RCMC (the research institution of the Wereldmuseum) in collaboration with De Rooij, Karwan Fatah-Black and the Centraal Museum in Utrecht, is organising a symposium in which artists, scholars and workers in memory institutions will pursue conversations on the how artistic practice, museum operations and art history knowledge work are responding to these challenges, and what remains to be grappled with. We want to start by looking closely at the paintings of Dirk Valkenburg, what they make visible and what they obscure, as well as the implications of this period of Dutch art for the discipline of Art History and museum collections in the face of demands for restitution, decolonization and repair.

Schedule of event on 19 January at Wereldmuseum Leiden

Please note that the programme will be in English

Julie Hartkamp is a junior curator at the Mauritshuis in The Hague. An art historian specialising in early modern visual culture in Italy and the Netherlands, she is particularly interested in the intersections of iconography, materiality, and technique. In the Valkenburg project, she compiled the catalogue raisonné of Dirk Valkenburg’s oeuvre and examined his standardised modes of production, engaging with seventeenth-century notions of seriality and originality. Within her curatorial work, she seeks to question the concepts of ‘quality’ and ‘originality’ in Western aesthetics in order to create space for new, more inclusive narratives. At the Mauritshuis, she is currently preparing a project on the museum’s colonial history in relation to Dutch Brazil and aims to explore questions revealing colonial dimensions in the formation, interpretation, and display of the collection.