30 October 2025
Housed in the Wereldmuseum archive are numerous batik textiles collected during colonial rule of the Dutch East Indies. While curators of batik exhibitions have lauded examples of the exquisite and refined, the archives in Amsterdam also contain batik that is arguably not very delicate in composition, eclectic in choice of motifs or—as stray drops of wax that mark some of the cloths expose—even particularly well made. A number of these textiles match batik held in the Smithsonian Institution’s collection and are attributed to prison labor on the island of Java in the early decades of the 20th century. The chances that the textiles in the Wereldmuseum and Smithsonian archives do not share the same place of production seems unlikely. The Reading Material project attempts to understand these batiks through the journeys they have taken and the labour conditions of the women who made them.
