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![Maasai Insight Share]()
Reclaiming the Exhibition: the Case of Insight Share
IN CONVERSATION WITH EUGENE VAN ERVEN Equalizing, liberating or decolonizing museums, to me, should be about participation, a notion that is not self-evident or always an inherently good thing. Anyone intent on decolonizing museums could benefit from critically exploring the complexities involved in participation. There is no need here to recapitulate the troubled histories of western public and private museums; Tony Bennett and other new museology scholars already started paving…
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![Reading by Osmosis: Nature Interprets Man4]()
Reading by Osmosis: Nature Interprets Man
IN CONVERSATION WITH SEMÂ BEKIROVIĆ EN GIJSJE HEEMSKERK Artist Semâ Bekirović has often collaborated with natural processes and entities. Her most recent exhibition project ‘Reading By Osmosis’ at Het Glazen Huis (Amsterdam), Bekirović takes on the role of curator, instead of producer, of the art works. She uses her human capacities to offer a platform to non-human artists, thereby showing us that artists don’t necessarily have to be human. In…
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Reflecting on a World Dominated by Adults: Making Art With Youngsters
IN CONVERSATION WITH MEREL ZWARTS Departing from MOED’s online exhibition Onion/Union: Crafting Teenage Identities, a collaboration between MOED and artist, art educator, and researcher Merel Zwarts, we invited Merel to discuss her work with us. This resulted in an interesting exchange in which she reflects on her own work, the political, and social dimensions of it and the way she amplifies children’s voices in a world that is dominated by…
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![Gloria Wekker, speech Ain't I a Woman]()
Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I A Woman?” revisited
A CONVERSATION BETWEEN GLORIA WEKKER, NANCY JOUWE, AND SOJOURNER TRUTH On the occasion of the exhibition MOED: What is Left Unseen in the Centraal Museum, Gloria Wekker performed Sojourner Truth’s notorious speech Ain’t I A Woman?, originally delivered at the Women's Convention in Akron, Ohio, on May 29, 1851. With Ain’t I A Woman?, Sojourner Truth voiced a critique to the middle-class white feminists who failed to take into account… -
![Count me in]()
Count Me In: Taking the Guerrilla Girls to Dutch Museums
IN CONVERSATION WITH PAULINE SALET The Guerrilla Girls have been featured in several Dutch museums before. In 2016, the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven organised a retrospective exhibition of the artist and activist group, showing their work from their start in 1985 until 2012. A few years later, in March 2018, the Guerrilla Girls visited the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam themselves, as they were invited by Mama Cash as part of…
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![Politics of Representation: The Cases of Nola Hatterman and Jan Sluyters]()
Politics of Representation: The Cases of Nola Hatterman and Jan Sluyters
IN CONVERSATION WITH ASTRID KERCHMAN UPDATE: This article has been updated in August 2020, following the latest research outcomes on the person portrayed in Nola Hatterman’s On the Terrace (1930). Ellen de Vries has demonstrated that the model in the painting is Louis Richard Drenthe, instead of Jimmy van der Lak, which was believed before. De Vries has analyzed letters of Hatterman, where Hatterman, stating the name of Lou Drenthe.…
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![Loving In Your Own Language]()
Loving In Your Own Language
IN CONVERSATION WITH ANNE RENSMA In poetry, and specifically in the interactive performance of language that is spoken word, one can find potential to generate a world within a world: a safe space that does not only offer protection, but, maybe even more so, a place to live and to exist in. As such, the lure of loving in one’s own language has gradually made my pessimism grow softer. There…
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![Washing the Dishes with her Afro-Textured Hair: Aesthetic Innovation in the Performance Bombril by Priscila Rezende]()
Washing the Dishes with her Afro-Textured Hair: Aesthetic Innovation in the Performance Bombril by Priscila Rezende
IN CONVERSATION WITH ANA ABRIL Kneeling on the paved sidewalk and wearing a precarious dress made out of poor quality fabric, the Brazilian performer and visual artist Priscila Rezende (Belo Horizonte, Brazil, 1985) rubs a series of metal pots and lids used for cooking. The scene is already striking for the particularity of bringing a domestic action to the public space of the street. However, what astonishes the viewer the…
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![Guerrilla Girls X J.A.D. Ingres: Rethinking Agency in La Grande Odalisque]()
Guerrilla Girls X J.A.D. Ingres: Rethinking Agency in La Grande Odalisque
IN CONVERSATION WITH ASTRID KERCHMAN When I encountered the Guerrilla Girls poster Do Women Have To Be Naked To Get Into The Met. Museum (2012) (click here for the MOED X Guerrilla Girls exhibition) for the first time, many questions emerged, all centered around the following question: Why did the Guerrilla Girls specifically choose to appropriate the subject of the La Grande Odalisque? What is the story behind this painting,…
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![Graffiti Images on Tehran’s Walls: Using Art and Activism to Creatively Demand Justice in Post-revolutionary Iran]()
Graffiti Images on Tehran’s Walls: Using Art and Activism to Creatively Demand Justice in Post-revolutionary Iran
IN CONVERSATION WITH SAMA KHOSRAVI OORYAD Graffiti art in Iran has adopted a powerful and political stance against increasingly aggravated socio-political conflicts and injustices towards precarious communities. An anonymous art collective named The Street: Tribune for the Political Prisoner has initiated the painting of a series of black-and-white graffiti images on the walls of mostly Tehran city as well as other cities. They began this project in order to demand…
