19 January 2026
photography by Jens Ziehe
PUBLIC EVENT | 19 January, 2026 | 10.30 - 17.30 | Grote Zaal, Wereldmuseum Leiden
For this public symposium, the Research Center for Material Culture in collaboration with professors Willem de Rooij and Karwan Fatah-Black, as well as the Centraal Museum Utrecht will be hosting a public symposium in Wereldmuseum Leiden around the central questions and themes surrounding the newly opened exhibition Valkenburg — Willem de Rooij at Centraal Museum Utrecht.
The full program will follow shortly.
About the symposium
For this two-day symposium, hosted between Centraal Museum Utrecht and Wereldmuseum Leiden, 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, especially in the face of demands for restitution, decolonization and repair. With this exhibition, Willem is currently displaying and highlighting the culmination of many years’ of work on the Dutch artist Dirk Valkenburg, focussing on the entanglements of seventeenth century Dutch art with colonialism and slavery. He has produced a comprehensive publication together with Karwan of this work as well as a catalogue raisonné which is to be published imminently.
About Willem de Rooij
Since the early 1990s, Willem de Rooij (1969) has created temporary installations in that explore the politics of representation through appropriation and collaboration. In 2005, he represented the Netherlands at the Venice Biennale and has since exhibited in leading museums worldwide. A distinctive feature of his practice is the reuse and rearrangement of existing images and objects, often based on in-depth art-historical and cultural research. In doing so, he creates new meanings between diverse visual elements. Recent exhibitions include King Vulture (Akademie der Künste, Vienna) and Pierre Verger in Suriname (Portikus, Frankfurt). De Rooij teaches in Frankfurt, Berlin and Amsterdam and lectures internationally.
About the exhibition
Dirk Valkenburg (1675-1721) was one of the first Europeans to depict Indigenous and enslaved people on Surinamese plantations, while also painting hunting still lifes and portraits of Dutch elites. The breadth of his oeuvre makes it particularly relevant for research into colonial image production and the “white gaze”. In this installation, De Rooij displays 30 works in idiosyncratic combinations, inviting reflection on how these 18th-century Dutch elites used art to support and legitimise colonial ideology.
Accessibility
We are committed to making this event accessible to everyone. If you require specific accommodations to participate fully, please reach out to us at rcmc@wereldmuseum.nl
Provisions for people with reduced mobility
- Stairs with handrail
- Accessible lift
- Barrier-free building and passageways that are sufficiently wide
- Wheelchair-friendly restroom
Quiet rooms
There are two quiet spaces which can be used by conference attendees to take a break at any point. Directly opposite the conference room on the first floor, the Buddha Room offers a tranquil space. On the ground floor, at the end of the museum café, the Museum Lounge can be used to take a break. We cannot guarantee complete silence due to other visitors in the museum.
