During the Rijksakademie Open Studios (22 – 25 May 2025), the Pressing Matter research project and the Wereldmuseum Amsterdam will display a studio presentation of the 7 participants that were part of the Pressing Matter artist in residency program from 2022 until 2025. In conjunction with the Rijksakademie Open Studios, we have invited artists in residents from the Pressing Matter research project, who have selected works on display in the Unfinished Pasts exhibition, to engage in conversation with each other.
More information on the program will follow shortly.
Full program to follow shortly.
Confirmed speakers include:
Prior to the panel discussion, Lifepatch collective will hold a ritual performance of Arus Balik. The performance will combine the traditional Batak ritual of anggir drinking with a live demonstration of writing a pustaha on laklak (sacred wood).
Free ticket registration for this event can be found below. Your registration allows you to also visit the Unfinished Pasts exhibition for free. Visitors who purchased tickets for the Open Studios can show their tickets to the ticketdesk of the Wereldmuseum Amsterdam and they will be let in for free that day.
Unfinished Pasts explores the current debate surrounding restitution of which the Wereldmuseum is a part, and into its complexity. Visitors will encounter the questions the museum deals with on a daily basis. They encounter case studies on provenance research on objects that raise complex questions about ownership, value and the future of colonial collections. Questions about the legality and ethics of collecting. But also questions about the different meaning an value that objects hold today. Contemporary international artists and art collectives Pansee Atta, Daniel Aguilar Ruvalcaba, Aram Lee, Zara Julius and Zoé Samudzi, Hande Sever and Gelare Khoshgozaran and Lifepatch have a special place in the exhibition. Through their work, they respond to the past, present and future of these unfinished pasts in critical, creative and personal ways.
The Rijksakademie residency programme houses an artist community that is highly international, multi-disciplinary, experimental and critically engaged. Up to 50 artists are open to challenging themselves, and to working alongside positions that are vastly different from their own. Spending up to two years in residence, they enter into an open-ended process where they can deepen their practices, and explore new territories, in and beyond the art field.
Each year their Open Studios enable the artists to share their work with wider audiences in ambitious and imaginative ways. The public can also connect with the creative life of the Rijksakademie through our programme of lectures, performances and screenings that explore contemporary artistic practices and debates.
Pressing Matter is a four-year international research programme about colonial heritage and its legacies, financed by the Dutch National Science Agenda (NWA) and coordinated from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Pressing Matter investigates the potentialities of ‘colonial objects’ to support societal reconciliation with the colonial past and its afterlives, and to deal with conflicting claims by different stakeholders for these objects within museums.
Partners are the National Museum of World Cultures, Museum Bronbeek, Museum Vrolik, Rijksmuseum, the museums of Utrecht University and University of Groningen, Foundation Academic Heritage and the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Societal partners are Imagine IC, The Black Archives, HAPIN Papua Support Foundation, the Rijksacademie, Framer Framed and the Peace Palace Library, the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands and DutchCulture.
