Un/Engendering the Collections - Launch of 2 volumes

Wayne Modest is Director of Content of the National Museum of World Culture (a museum group comprising the Tropenmuseum, Museum Volkenkunde, Africa Museum) and the Wereldmuseum Rotterdam, in the Netherlands. He is also Professor (by special appointment) of Material Culture and Critical Heritage Studies at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam.

A cultural studies scholar by training, Modest works at the intersection of material culture, memory and heritage studies, with a strong focus on colonialism and its afterlives in Europe and the Caribbean. His most recent publications include the co-edited publications, Matters of Belonging: Ethnographic Museums in A Changing Europe (Sidestone Publications, 2019, together with Nick Thomas, et al), and Victorian Jamaica (Duke University press: 2018, together with Tim Barringer). Modest has (co)curated several exhibitions, most recently, What We Forget, with artists Alana Jelinek, Rajkamal Kahlon, Servet Kocyigit and Randa Maroufi, an exhibition that challenged dominant, forgetful representations of Europe that erase the role of Europe’s colonial past in shaping our contemporary world.

Diego Semerene is Assistant Professor of Queer and Transgender Media at the University of Amsterdam and co-founder of the Queer Analysis Research Group of the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA). Not unlike the subject matter of this article, finding a proper pronoun to refer to the author is impossible. Yet the conventions of a biographical account accompanying such a text demand that a pronoun eventually be used in order to avoid the endless repetition of the author’s name throughout the text. This makes for an embarrassing situation for the author, which also mirrors, or incarnates, the thesis of the text itself. If the author uses “he,” readers may quickly accept that premise –or sentence, or symptom – perhaps not without questioning the author’s authority or lived experience to speak on trans-ness. Or so the author fears. If the author uses “she,” readers may question such a self-entitlement on the grounds that they wouldn’t recognize sufficient visual signs in the author’s photographic portrait, or the author’s first name, to substantiate the claim. If the author uses “they,” or some neologism of a pronoun, this may pass as a good compromise, sparing the author from sharing the embarrassment so akin to the objects at the center of the article. But the neutrality of such terms would be a lie for the author does not, at the level of self-identification, reject these binaries. The author is a product of these binaries, of their hyperbolic Latin American demands in specific, and has come to, in the most psychoanalytic sense of the term, enjoy them – despite everything. Which is also embarrassing, politically. The author will thus replace the utilization of a pronoun with this problematization in order to mark the impossibility of the situation, and of language writ large, and in the hopes that the speaking subject might neuter some of the embarrassment derived from embarrassing situations and embarrassing objects by writing them out. Or by displaying them.

Carine Zaayman is an artist, curator and scholar committed to critical engagement with colonial archives and collections, specifically those holding strands of Khoekhoe pasts in South Africa. She is a researcher at the Research Center for Material Culture (NMvWC). The main focus of her curatorial work is the project Under Cover of Darkness(http://undercoverofdarkness.co.za/), which included an exhibition staged at the Iziko Slave Lodge in Cape Town, that explored the lives of women in servitude, especially slavery, in the early Cape Colony.

Ida Hillerup Hansen is a Lecturer in Gender and Postcolonial studies at Utrecht University’s Graduate Gender Studies Programme. They hold a double PhD degree from the Department of Gender Studies at Central European University and the Institute for Cultural Inquiry at Utrecht University. Their domains of teaching and research interests include feminist and queer approaches to psychoanalytic theory, poststructuralism and onto-epistemology, theories of bio- and necropolitics and affect and embodiment. Ida is currently working on a chapter and article publications based on their PhD dissertation Being Through Loss: A Queer Performative Reckoning with Grief. They are a member of the Queer Death Studies Network and the co-founder of the Relation(al) Matters Archive with Associate Professor Kathrin Thiele. 

Eliza Steinbock (they/them) is Associate Professor of Gender and Diversity Studies and director of the research platform Centre for Gender and Diversity at Maastricht University. Driving their interdisciplinary research is the question of how local visual and material cultures can be marshalled to respond to global challenges of inclusion and exclusion mechanisms experienced by marginalised people, foremost identified as queer and trans. This focus has directed their investigation into the politics of cultural production and exhibition in the film, arts, and heritage sectors resulting in 40+ articles and book chapters analysing the intersecting dimensions of gender, sexuality, race, and ability. They acquired funding for “Vital Art: Transgender Portraiture as Visual Activism” (NWO Veni 2014-2018), “The Critical Visitor: Intersectional Approaches for Rethinking and Retooling Accessibility and Inclusivity in Heritage Spaces” (NWO Smart Culture 2020-2025), and "Perverse Collections: Building Europe's Queer and Trans Archives" (European Joint Programme Initiative - Cultural Heritage 2023-2025). They authored the Society for Cinema and Media Studies awarded best first book, Shimmering Images: Trans Cinema, Embodiment, and the Aesthetics of Change (Duke, 2019) and is co-editor of Art and Activism in the Age of Systemic Crisis: Aesthetic Resilience (Routledge, 2020). Together with Susan Stryker and Jian Neo Chen, Eliza co-edits the Duke book series for critical trans studies, ASTERISK: Gender, Trans-, and All That Comes After. https://www.elizasteinbock.com/

Liang-Kai YU studies contemporary art, critical museology, and queer theory, with a focus on queer artistic and curatorial productions. Currently conducting on-site ethnographic research at the Van Abbemuseum, his doctoral research explores contemporary LGBT+ curatorial and artistic interventions into the Dutch and other international art museums. Interpreting contract workers, curators, activists, and artists as the “critical visitors”, this project raises questions about intersectional politics of displaying sexual minorities, ways of collecting marginalized histories, and artistic fabulations of deviant museology. The project is funded by The Dutch Research Council (NWO), part of the consortium research project “The Critical Visitor: The Heritage Sector at a Crossroads: The Way of Intersectionality.” In 2020, he co-curated a queer feminist exhibition 不適者生存? Survival of the Exceptional at Tainan Art Museum in Taiwan.

In the past two decades, she has actively engaged in two professional trajectories: one in the academe; the other in cultural diplomacy. Her inquiry is one highly informed by the pedagogical communities that she has had the fortune to be a part of. Upon moving to the Netherlands, she had the privilege of teaching in various institutions: Radboud University; University of Amsterdam; Hogeschool Utrecht; University College Utrecht; and she maintains an affiliation with Gender Studies at Utrecht University. From 2009-2019, she served as Assistant professor and was promoted to Associate Professor of Caribbean and Postcolonial Studies and French at the Graduate Center (City University of New York). Previously, she worked at the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in New York as Director of Development and at the Québec Government Office in New York as Attachée for Inter-Governmental and Academic Affairs. Most recently she was a student at the Black European Summer School in Amsterdam and Critical Muslim Studies: Decolonial Struggles and Liberation Theologies in Granada. She is Series Editor for Brill’s Caribbean Series and a Book Reviews Editor for the Journal of Haitian Studies, as well as a member of the FACE Foundation’s French Voices selection committee.

Josep Almudéver Chanzà is an early career researcher and a poet. He is interested in the spatial configurations of religion, care, gender and sexuality, and in the politics of cultural memory in post-authoritarian societies. He obtained his PhD from the University of Edinburgh (UK) in 2021 with a thesis entitled '(Re)inventions and (Dis)continuations of the Catholic Tradition: Community-Making in a Spanish Village’. Josep's academic work has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Gender, Place and Culture, and you can read some of his poetry in Under the Radar, Brittle Star and The Interpreter's House. Tw: @clearlighbulb  

With Wonu Veys and Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken, Josep Almudéver Chanzà is co-editor of the Un/Engendering volumes that are emerging from this initiative. 

Wonu Veys has curated What a Genderful World, first presented at the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam in 2019 and then in the Wereldmuseum in Rotterdam in 2020; A Sea of Islands – Masterpieces from Oceania at the Volkenkunde in Leiden in 2021; the Mana Māori exhibition (2010-2011) at the Volkenkunde in Leiden and published a book with the same title. She co-curated the Australian Art exhibition with Dr. Georges Petitjean and a barkcloth exhibition Tapa, Étoffes cosmiques d’Océanie in Cahors in 2009 with Laurent Guillaut. Her fieldwork sites include New Zealand (since 2000), Tonga (since 2003) and more recently Arnhem Land, Australia (since 2014). Her topics of interest and expertise include Pacific art and material culture, museums and cultures of collecting, Pacific musical instruments, Pacific textiles, and the significance of historical objects in a contemporary setting.