Amsterdam Museum @ Hermitage – Koloniale Verhalen (2022)
Type: Exhibition Design
Concept: Setareh Noorani
Technical team: Setareh Noorani and Jelmer Teunissen
Advice: Studio LA
Graphic Design: Bas Koopmans
Client: Amsterdam Museum
Photography: Gert Jan van Rooij
Koloniale Verhalen: Work in Progress has the ambition to openly show the questions and imaginings surrounding the colonial legacy embedded in the collection. This is a sensitive legacy, living in different timelines and reflected differently in the bodies that will visit the exhibition. And, a legacy that is currently being reimagined, where we are made sharers in the process.
How can we approach these histories – both spatially and temporally? How to underline the non-linear and networked nature of a canon, with its “heroes” presented to us as insurmountable and unquestionable, and the new examples to which we can relate? In this, the design takes on the audacity and intention of the research team to secure and retell this intersection of timelines and bodies.
Following crossroads thinking and the various dreamed futures within Afrofuturism, design seeks the destabilization of the “line” and the grid – used to colonize and map – and normative ways of seeing and assigning value. This usually comes together in exhibition design, where the monumental nature of an object relates to (historical) value and the pedestals it is placed on. How can the objects on display be approached and related to each other in other ways? It is a continuous process, a labor, a work in progress to unfold the structures of a normalized and extractive worldview. To understand this process is also to uncover these underlying structures.
Methods deployed spatially is mirroring, juxtaposing, defacing, breaking up/remixing and sampling/echoing visual elements to show connections. Stripping typical pedestals / but giving a new pedestal to collaboration and self-determination. Questioning euclidean and monumental forms (related to the grid) and contrasting the immobility of the canon, and the distance it creates, with fragile, temporary materials that call out to come closer.