Museum Curator Unearths the Roots of Colonial ArtSpanish Market
Looking Back on a Colonial Struggle, a Museum Stirs New Disputes
At kingdom of the netherlands' national museum, describing the events in which Indonesia threw off Dutch colonial rule was never going to exist easy.
AMSTERDAM — When the Rijksmuseum decided to stage a major exhibition on Indonesia'south struggle for freedom from 350 years of Dutch colonial rule, its managing director knew he was stepping into contested territory.
"If you stage exhibitions, as nosotros practice, most our history, that as well includes parts of our history that are difficult," said Taco Dibbits, who has led kingdom of the netherlands' national museum since 2016. "You know that there are going to be reactions, fifty-fifty very emotional reactions, but that's one of the reasons we did it: to contribute to dialogue."
Yet the discussion around the Rijksmuseum's "Revolusi! Indonesia Contained" bear witness, which starts Feb. eleven and runs through June 5, came quicker than Dibbits might have hoped. Before the show even opened, a Dutch lawmaker accused the museum of "woke madness" and a foundation filed a merits of genocide denial against a curator.
Ever since Indonesia'southward first president, Sukarno, declared independence on Aug. 17, 1945, the four-and-a-half-year struggle that came next has been difficult to ascertain. Some cast information technology as a revolution, others as a war between kingdom of the netherlands and the new Indonesian Republic, and still others as a procedure of decolonization.
The fighting claimed the lives of some 100,000 Indonesians, both combatants and civilians, while an estimated 5,500 Dutch and Indo-Dutch colonialists, as well as members of other ethnic groups associated with colonial power, were murdered in attacks by Indonesian insurgents.
Today, some 2 million residents of the Netherlands, a land of about 17 million people, are former inhabitants of Indonesia and their descendants, or linked in some other personal way to Republic of indonesia, said Dibbits. Yet he said that many Dutch people weren't enlightened of the Indonesian side of the story, which is not ofttimes taught in school.
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Four curators led the Rijksmuseum's exhibition squad — ii Dutch and two Indonesian — and they began their research and collaboration in 2018. The show they produced focuses on how the struggle was experienced past eyewitnesses including artists, journalists and activists.
Controversy has been roiling effectually the exhibition since January, when 1 of the exhibition'southward Indonesian curators, Bonnie Triyana, wrote an opinion essay in the Dutch national newspaper NRC Handelsblad outlining the Rijksmuseum'south arroyo. In the essay, Triyana said that the curators had decided not to use a loaded word that some Dutch people use as a catchall for the violence of the independence struggle, but which some Indonesians empathize as racist.
Triyana wrote that the Malay word "bersiap" — which means "stand up by!" and was often shouted past Indonesians every bit a battle cry — was associated with "archaic, uncivilized Indonesians every bit perpetrators of the violence." Because the term risked simplifying this history, he said, the exhibition would avert using it and would substitute more specific terminology.
Merely Micha'el Lentze, a board member and spokesman for the Federation of Indo-Dutch, a foundation that represents the interests of some 300,000 people who were repatriated to the Netherlands during the struggle, and their descendants, said many survivors employ the discussion to describe a period of "ethnic cleansing."
The federation filed a legal complaint, arguing that Triyana had violated a European statute outlawing genocide deprival because he was "negating historical facts." "The word is not important," Lentze said, "simply the fact that people have been murdered because of their European or Dutch descent, or for being Chinese, is important."
The public prosecutor'south function dismissed the complaint on Wednesday, but Lentze said the federation would appeal.
Shortly later the NRC stance essay was published, Annabel Nanninga, a Dutch senator from the right-wing JA21 party, said the decision "to ban" the discussion "bersiap" from the Rijksmuseum evidence was part of a blueprint of "woke madness" at the museum.
It does appear in the exhibition, though: in the catalog (which had been sent to the printer before the controversy erupted, Dibbits said) and on a museum wall in text describing Indonesian insurgent attacks on civilians.
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Dibbits said the museum had never banned the give-and-take, simply decided to limit its use, and provide context effectually it. "Information technology's our duty every bit the Rijksmuseum to give people a more complete picture of our history. I meet information technology equally adding to our history. I don't see it as woke," Dibbits said. Triyana did non respond to interview requests.
Remco Raben, a historian at the University of Amsterdam, who teaches colonial and postcolonial history and worked every bit a consultant to the museum's curators, said, "I think the museum got cold feet because of the outcry, because of this very tiny group of Indo-Dutch who started this legal case."
Dibbits refuted that idea. "We didn't," he said. "Otherwise, nosotros wouldn't have organized the exhibition."
In the procedure of developing the bear witness, Raben said he met with curators to pinpoint interest groups that might be afflicted, including Dutch war veterans who served in Republic of indonesia, and people of Indo-Dutch heritage.
"I warned them," Raben said. "But they were too enlightened that they couldn't do right. Heated discussions would emerge anyhow."
Formerly known as the Dutch Due east Indies, Indonesia is an archipelago of more 13,500 islands: In 1945, it had a population of more than 68 one thousand thousand people. Raben said it had been of import to find a "polyphony" of perspectives for the exhibition, or, every bit he wrote in the itemize, "a whole wide range of diverse, cluttered, contradictory voices."
Paradigm
These perspectives are represented past 230 objects. The show begins with a photo of Sukarno making his celebrated independence proclamation in 1945, just rather than highlighting the revolutionary leader, the curators draw attention to the man behind the camera: the photojournalist Soemarto Frans Mendur, whom the itemize describes equally "Indonesia's showtime photojournalist."
A green fatigue shirt on display, riddled with bullet holes, belonged to Tjokorda Rai Pudak, a Balinese man who founded a socialist youth arrangement called the Fighting King of beasts. A local Balinese militia, supported by a Dutch patrol, arrested Pudak and executed him.
Jeanne van Leur-de Loos, an Indo-Dutch woman who was imprisoned in an internment camp during Earth War 2, is introduced through a long colonial-style wearing apparel made from scraps of silk military maps that she constitute at a flea market. Later Indonesian independence, she was forced to repatriate to the Netherlands.
Amir Sidharta, the show's other Indonesian curator, said that the exhibition'due south most important contribution was to look beyond the violence of the menstruum.
"My son is studying the revolution, and he thought that everything was just state of war," Sidharta said. "I said, 'No: There was diplomacy, and in that location was fine art, and in that location are all these other aspects of life going on.'"
"Unfortunately I recall that's something that is not taught," Sidharta said. "These everyday life stories assistance united states of america shape a more than complete comprehension of the revolution, rather than merely the violence."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/10/arts/design/rijksmuseum-revolusi-indonesia-independent.html
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