MOED: What is Left Unseen

The Centraal Museum owns a number of artefacts referring to the history of Nicolaas Beets (1814-1903), a white Utrecht-based writer (known as Hildebrand), professor, theologist and abolitionist. In the exhibition his story, that fits easily in the narrative of the white male saviour, was placed in a transnational context of Black resistance. This formed the starting point of a visualization of a genealogy starting with the abolition movement and linking it to the struggle of anti-racism and Black knowledge development in the Netherlands. Thérèse Schwartze’s portrait of Beets, his bust and his desk were placed in dialogue with Iris Kensmil’s portrait (2019) of Sojourner Truth (c. 1797-1883). Truth was a former enslaved woman, an outspoken abolitionist and an advocate for women’s rights. Both Beets and Truth were connected to the National Freedman’s Relief Association. Truth is considered to be the foremother of intersectionality and has inspired Dutch Black feminist academics such as Gloria Wekker and Philomena Essed to continue her work around the entanglements of race and gender in the past and present. Like Beets, both Wekker and Essed are affiliated as professors to Utrecht University. Wekker and Essed are featured in Patricia Kaersenhout’s series Proud Rebels (2015), works that concluded this part of the exhibition. The presence of contemporary Black female academics in the exhibition highlights and archives the importance of the continuation of the work of Truth and Beets. Thus, instead of telling the story of Nicolaas Beets from the perspective of the white male saviour who, as an autonomous acting individual, saves the world, the exhibition emphasized the entanglement of his work with three prominent Black women freedom fighters and situates them all in a shared history of female, male, white and Black intellectuals and activists.

In the second room, MOED elaborated on the narrative of the white male saviour by asking the question of what it means to imagine a Christianity that is not exclusively characterized by whiteness. Nola Hatterman’s Pieta (1949), part of the museum’s permanent collection, formed the starting point of the room. The painting depicts the body of a Black Jesus, surrounded by believers lamenting his death. The painting unsettled Eurocentric ways of seeing premised on a racial identification with Christianity as white. This problematization was continued by including Samuel Aranda’s winning World Press Photo from 2011, dubbed Muslim Pieta by the media. The works of the two contemporary Black British Artists, Rotimi Fani-Kayode (1955-1989) and Faisal Abdu’Allah (1969-), delinked Christianity even more from whiteness. Through the combination of these works, the room visualized the entanglements of race, religion, empathy and compassion, and the set up showed how tightly the visual repertoire of Christianity is linked to whiteness and what this means for mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion.