Stedelijk Studies Journal Issue #14
Transnational Curatorial Practice:
Amsterdam from 1970s
An Online Conversation
Armand Baag, De stoffenhandelaar (The fabric merchant), 1976, oil on canvas, 83.6 × 63.7 cm.
Amsterdam from 1970s
An Online Conversation
Armand Baag, De stoffenhandelaar (The fabric merchant), 1976, oil on canvas, 83.6 × 63.7 cm.
September 24, 2024
Elize Mazadiego (EM): Thank you, Els, for your participation in this conversation. I’d like to begin with addressing some of the gaps that this issue couldn’t necessarily fill around the question of Amsterdam’s transnational and decolonial histories of art, particularly in reference to Black and Brown artists and communities. This is something that we, the editors, recognize as still not fully defined in the issue, or simply missing. Could you start by telling us where you think we stand today and how you started?
Els van der Plas (EP): That’s the most difficult question, of course, because we’re still in the process of these—positive—changes. In that sense, I think we [Amsterdam and the Netherlands] are late in the process. When I started the Gate Foundation, it was 1987. It was already late to dive into these art developments with attention to our colonial pasts, to decolonize—this was not a term used in that time—our art institutes, and give attention to so-called “non-Western” art and artists.
At the moment, you wonder where we are going as a society, especially if you look at the actual schisms in society. I mean, at one end, there are all the museums and cultural institutes that get subsidies if or when they’re “diverse” or “decolonial.” On the other hand, we’re moving towards ultra-right systems of thought and politics. And I look at the United States, because I think we are always lagging behind the developments that happen there. We will probably also go in that direction. The US went through a long history of decolonial and diverse developments, which gave power to Black movements, Black Lives Matter, and at the same time stimulated racism. It seems that the schisms and polarizations in American society are getting worse and worse.
So, if you would ask how decolonial society should look like in Amsterdam or what we should strive for, then I would define it in very abstract terms. We need a balance in society inspired and stimulated by good education, we need a rewriting of our histories, we should have real respect for each other, et cetera. Which, on one side, is really a sort of value system, and on the other side may remain too abstract. That makes it complex.
If I think about how I started, for example, with the Gate Foundation, I ask myself, why did I do that? In 1987, I was young, I was 27. I was a white woman. Why did I start that initiative? It was because I studied art history, and after my studies—when unemployment was very high—I began an internship at the Museum of Ethnology in Leiden, as an assistant in the Japanese and Korean department. Why? Because my father and grandfather went to Japan, and they were so enthusiastic about the country and its cultures. Consequently, I wanted to know more about [the Asian region]. I could not have imagined how that internship would be a steep learning curve for me. It taught me a lot about these kinds of institutes, about the problematic “white gaze” towards our past and the world, and in what way I was part of that position, without even realizing it.
I realized what a discriminatory institute the Museum of Ethnology was, focusing on the colonial interpretation of a country or a culture from a historic position that was problematic and raised a lot of questions.
I started to travel and was very interested in what contemporary artists were making in India or in Japan, or in any other country.
I’m now at the Allard Pierson, a museum and knowledge institute which is part of the [University of Amsterdam]. The question is, what are they doing now about their own position towards colonial history? What are they doing within museum studies or cultural history? There are all kinds of initiatives, but there’s not really a university policy. I think a university that big should also have a policy of how we would like to educate our future generations who will be, in the near future, at the helm of all kinds of institutions that will make up our society, or will be part of those institutions or of policymaking. So, I think the university, but also schools, have responsibilities towards the education of our next generation. And we have choices, how we want our younger generations to develop and grow. The ignorance about our colonial histories, about history in general, and about our cultural heritage in the Netherlands is quite staggering. We need to tell those histories at universities, at cultural institutions, at schools, because people don’t know that there are other histories to tell, or hidden stories to discover. That there are other histories or other stories to research. Yes, if there is a future ideal society, we have to look at education in the broad sense and change or adjust that system.
EM: I’d like to follow up with what you were saying—how your education was really formative to you becoming aware of the gaps in history. That, in one way, was an impetus to start the Gate Foundation. Then the other aspect is about understanding how fundamental systems of education and institutions, such as the University of Amsterdam and the Allard Pierson, are in correcting historical gaps. This speaks to where you are now with your directorial position at Allard Pearson. But let’s go back to the Gate Foundation, because it was an institution that was specifically focused on the visual arts. What motivated you to create this kind of institution in the late ’80s, that could respond to some of these issues through art?
EP: If you look at the Gate Foundation, it was a very small institution and initiative. I had done some voluntary work for another institution on dance, and I told them I wanted to start an organization that focused on contemporary art from Asia. They offered me one of their office spaces. I started a foundation—stichting, in Dutch—so I needed a board and I selected members of the board with, among others, Ken Vos, the Japan and Korea conservator at the Museum of Ethnology in Leiden. He became the chair. That’s how I started, basically.
The idea was born when working in the museum for ethnology and at the same time traveling the world and visiting artists and institutes of art in countries like India, Vietnam, Hong Kong and Indonesia. It did not match, the discrepancy was too big. I was also driven by a sense of justice. I did not understand why contemporary and modern art that we studied and learned about in Europe, was such a closed stronghold without much interest in art from, for example, our former colonies or Iraq, Afghanistan or elsewhere. There seem to be a disbalance in possibilities and opportunities.
Through my travels and reading, I also increasingly discovered that we had founded the academies in Indonesia and Surinam, the English in India, the Portuguese in Mozambique and the French in Mali for example. Artists were therefore educated with European art history, with a vocabulary that did not often touch their own. Moreover, academies in the 80s and 90s were populated by lost development workers who painted in their spare time. The disrespect was all-pervasive.
There were also artists who tried to get free from those histories, or wanted to bring it to the fore. Through them I learned about the history of the country, and also about their art history and the work they made themselves and why.
The idea of founding the Gate Foundation was at the start to be a platform for contemporary art from countries in Asia. The focus was on Asian art and artists. This interest stemmed from the fact that I did research through traveling and visiting artists and exhibitions or ateliers in countries in Asia, and through my research and work at the Museum of Ethnology at the Korea and Japan department. Because I didn’t have any money, I started with Asian artists living in the Netherlands. I started documenting Asian artists or artists of Asian descent who were living in the Netherlands and trying to reach out to them and see what they created. I built up an archive. I was focusing on slides of their work, texts, catalogues, reviews, plus their CVs and all these things. At the same time, I collected books and documentations of artists I had visited in Asia, or with Asian backgrounds in Europe.
I started working on a concept for an Indian contemporary art exhibition with four artists from South India where I had travelled to in the South around Madras: R.M. Palaniappan, P. Gopinath, S. Nandagopal, and K. Jayapal Panicker. (1.12.1989-15.1.1990). I went to several museums, starting with museums of modern art [in the Netherlands]. The Stedelijk Museum was the first museum I went to, of course. However, they really were not interested. They literally said, “In India you don’t have contemporary or modern art. It doesn’t exist.” Museums of modern art only showed modern and contemporary art from Europe and the United States. A real international focus was not part of their policy. Museums of ethnology started to exhibit art by contemporary artists from countries that were their focus of attention. But the context of those institutions was colonial. However, there was more of an openness towards the contemporary cultural production, also because they were in a position in which they had to question their own position and policy. At some point, they even had to question their right to exist.
In the ’80s and ’90s a critical attitude towards these ethnological museums developed. “Migrants” became more assertive. They demanded their position in society and criticized these colonial institutes. That is also a reason why these organizations started to research contemporary cultural production.
In London, Rasheed Araeen demanded access to the so-called temples of modern art. So, also the museums of modern art were criticized because of their white, Eurocentric policies and collections.
Also, the art subsidies were scrutinized, there was no attention for the financing of art from countries outside Europe and America (mostly with the remark that ‘it had not enough quality’), or for artists with ‘migrant’ backgrounds or as they called it at that time ‘with bicultural backgrounds’. Ethnological museums were interestingly enough financed by the Ministry for Development Cooperation and not by the Ministry of Culture.
In the end, the first exhibition with four artists from South India took place in Limburg at Castle Arcen, because no art institute was interested. Afterwards, I also organized another exhibition in this venue, Nederland-Japan, on the influence of Japanese culture on Dutch artists and Japanese artists living in the Netherlands, with Simsa Cho, Suchan Kinoshita, Tetsu Nakamura, Eva Veldhoen, and others, because they liked what we had been doing. I asked for financial support from the Prince Bernhard Fund for the show with Indian artists, which I got. We were not funded by the government at that time.
Neither the museum network nor the money that went to cultural institutions was focused on decolonial issues, diversity, inclusion, etcetera. That was not a topic, really. So, what I did was very new. I realized that, for the artists, it would make a difference if their work would be shown in a museum of modern art, or a museum that was knowledgeable about contemporary art. However, that was the most difficult part, actually. Curators of modern art institutes were not interested, and financially there was no funding for these kind of initiatives.
In Europe at the time there were different people active in the field of decolonial issues. In London, it was, among others, artist and thinker Rasheed Araeen. He organized The Other Story (1989). He published the journal Third Text, and INIVA was later set up in 1994.
In Paris, there was Jean Hubert Martin, who was heading the Centre Pompidou. In Berlin, you had the Haus der Kulturen der Welt. Rasheed and Jean Hubert, the latter organized Magiciens de la Terre in 1989, both had very different views on how to position art from the so-called “non-West.” They had different views on what to research and discuss. But they were very active and, for me, both were an inspiration and challenged me in what I was doing.
There were very few initiatives in the field of art that focused on decolonial issues in the Netherlands. Of course, I could talk to the artists, the people directly involved, and some people involved in the initiatives in the ethnological museums, but mostly they had a different focus. The colleagues in France, England, and Germany were, for me, more interesting, and a good sounding board and information source. In that sense, it was for me more an European movement than a Dutch one.
Actually, at a certain point, I broadened the focus of the Gate Foundation. It became more linked to the broader topic of exclusion versus inclusion in the art world. It was not so interesting to say, “Okay, we’re going to focus on Asia or Africa, or maybe even a country.” It was much more interesting to look into art and artists from “non-Western” or “non-European” countries, the topics of decoloniality, of exclusion and inclusion, and the opposite positions of the art museums and ethnological museums. Issues of what is European, or how did the European colonial past influence art histories and histories of migration, linked to the colonial past and way of thinking. Of course, all those positions and histories are linked. The focus of the Gate Foundation shifted because of the common threads in those (art) histories and positions and because of the international focus of the arts, the exhibitions, and the debates we organized and we wanted to organize.
Charl Landvreugd (CL): Could you please very briefly sketch the funding problem? Art versus non-art, where everything Black was considered non-art. Can you attach that financial situation to unpack the problems of the funding?
EP: I think the funding part was crucial, especially the funding from the government. The interesting thing was that the first financial support I got was from the Prince Bernhard Fund. Which is a private funder. The government was a long time in denial. It was responsible for the education system, and the education system didn’t talk about the history of slavery or our colonial past, and if they talked about it, it was from another angle. [The Netherlands] didn’t talk about former colonies in Suriname or Indonesia and the consequences for current societies—it wasn’t a topic. We’re not good at taking responsibility or confronting our dark histories in the Netherlands. I mean, we even still can’t really talk about the Second World War and what we did wrong. It’s not any different with our colonial histories. Well, even bragging about our colonial past—VOC mentality—is part of this “not dealing with our past.” It’s all connected.
The Ministry of Culture didn’t focus on decolonial policies, either. There was a moment when it shifted, when new migration waves started and became a political and social topic. Turkish and Moroccan workers came into the Netherlands. We were used to people of Indonesian descent and from Suriname, but this migration was sort of new.
The Netherlands’ colonial history was neglected. Our art institutions dealt with modern and contemporary European art, linked to modernism. The good thing, of course, was that Araeen said, “I am a modernist. I’m part of modernism, and I’m Pakistani.” That broadened the concept of modernism, but also of being British.
It has taken a very long time for the Ministry of Culture to finance institutes that were created by Black people. Take, for example, OSCAM in Amsterdam-Zuidoost. They have been there already for a very long time, doing great work, and were never funded. Now they receive money from the government. I call this institutional racism, or discrimination of Black institutions. It’s also a way of not being confronted with our colonial histories—also through Black bodies—because it confronts us with a lot of other issues as well, with what we did wrong, with our complex past, with linking the current societal problems with our own colonial histories.
CL: I would like to add a thread to this. When the Surinamese people came, and the Moroccans, the Turkish, there was a policy of integration into Dutch culture while retaining ones own culture. This means that money was made available for these migrant groups to experience their culture within the Dutch culture. This also meant that artists from these migration groups were seen as creating their own culture within their own culture. That meant that it was impossible for these artists to be taken seriously as artists within the bigger story. Consequently, there was money for cultural activities, but no money for art.
EP: You are right. You had, for example, the founding and funding of Stichting Phoenix in Rotterdam and different cities in the Netherlands. A separate institution for the “ ‘intercultural’ production and activities. You had all these kinds of initiatives that were separated from the mainstream cultural institutions like the Stedelijk or the Stadsschouwburg. They received funding to separately develop policies and activities. So they never became part of the mainstream cultural infrastructure. In those times, they often came to me and asked, “Els, do you know some experts from Suriname, Morocco, or Turkey for our advising committee, or for a board or board of trustees?” I always felt embarrassed. They did not want to choose people who in their view did not fit within their structure or value system. Mostly they asked white persons who were dealing with diversity; letting Black people into their system was too big of a step. That has changed now.
CL: This contrasted severely with the policy of internationalism that was going on in Amsterdam at that moment, where if an artist went through, let’s say, the Rijksakademie or De Appel, that was the internationalism ID. Then they would be categorized as an artist. However, Black and Brown artists with a migratory background wouldn’t get into institutions like the Rijksakademie. They were always relegated to the “B” category, right?
EP: I think the artists with a migratory background were also confronting the Dutch with their flaws and faults. These artists from Brazil and Colombia who were coming to study at the Rijksakademie, for example. That was a parallel “stream.” They didn’t confront the Dutch the same way migrants or people from former colonies did. Also, institutes like the Rijksakademie and the Appel linked up to an international exchange of contemporary art.
CL: Specifically in that form of separation we’re still feeling the consequences of this now today.
EP: True. In the ’70s you had organizations like Time Based Arts, De Appel, and Mickery, with people like Wies Smals, which focused on international gatherings and activities. It didn’t matter where the artists and curators came from, they were welcome. The innovation that they brought was not so much linked to their cultural backgrounds, but it was really the innovation of the arts. It was the establishing of a video art community in Amsterdam, innovating media art, developing digitization and inspiring performances. Brazilian artists Claudio Goulart and Flavio Pons, or Colombian artist Raul Marroquin—who initiated the Hoeksteen live TV—were part of both those movements. They ate from two plates. For example, they were part of the Time Based Arts organization and the exhibition Het Klimaat: Foreign Artists in the Netherlands.
EM: Thanks to the publications of essays in the journal Third Text (1992), your essay discusses the Dutch governmental policies that encouraged foreign artists coming to and working in Amsterdam and the dissonance between this policy and a “political and social attitude towards non-Dutch people.” You highlight the sense of denial of particulaly the Netherlands’ postcolonial population. How did Het Klimaat respond to this problematic?
EP: The exhibition Het Klimaat, buitenlandse beeldend kunstenaars in Nederland (1991) was a manifestation of galleries and museums that focused on foreign artists in the Netherlands, organised by the Culturele Raad Zuid Holland. They hired me to organize and curate. We made no distinction in where artists came from. Involved galleries choose their own artists. Marina Abramović was on display in Galerie De Zaal in Delft, in Amsterdam Miguel Ángel Cárdenas was shown in Galerie Apunto, Ulay and Daniel Brun in Time Based Arts, Thom Puckey in Lumen Travo, Claudio Goulart en Flavio Pons in De Watertoren Hedendaagse Kunst in Vlissingen, amon many others. The central exhibition in the Stedelijk Museum De Lakenhal in Leiden showed work by amongst others Nicholas Kolenda, Svebor Krantz, Vinh Phuong and Hulya Yilmaz. The idea was that ‘coming from somewhere else’ and ‘being a migrant’ was a diverse concept that binds and connects foreign artists in the Netherlands. And that these artists influenced the Dutch art scene. In this way we tried to set up a ‘non-discriminatory’ concept. We made no distinction between whether people or their parents came from a former colony, or from a neighboring European country like Germany. We might do that differently now, but at the time bringing together European and non-European artists was an innovative move.
EM: Would you say that identity-based work was also perceived as problematic, if that was what was being foregrounded? I would say in the case of Cárdenas, to some extent, there is the possibility of being able to read that work as experimental and innovative in its use of materials. However, at the same time, you could also read it as being identity-based in the sense that he was talking about his own subjectivity as a migrant, as Latin American, as queer. Yet it wasn’t initially read as such and thus able to exist within these international exhibitions. Is it that identity-based work was perceived as more problematic? Or certain regions that were “marketable” could circumvent this problematic?
EP: Miguel-Ángel Cárdenas [1934–2015], also known as Michel Cardena, was a Colombian-Dutch, pop art painter and pioneer of video art in the Netherlands. His works cover a variety of artistic media, including painting, drawing, video, photography, object assemblages, and digital art. He was never seen as a migrant artist, but an international artist like Pons, Goulart, and Marroquín. That is the parallel art world Charl is referring to—they were mainstream. The “others” were migrant artists “disappearing” in Stichting Phoenix, to exaggerate.
Some artists lived the ‘switch’. The work of Bülent Evren, artist of Turkish descent, was in the 70s compared to that of Mondriaan, or was described as Mondriaan-like. When the debate within the art scene was also on migration, Bülent became more a Turkish or migrant artist than an artist whose work resembled the Dutch modernist movement. He moved between the main stream art scene (he was part of Ateliers ’63 for two years) and the separated platform for ‘migrant’ artists. He was also asked to be part of exhibitions like Het Klimaat: Foreign Artists in the Netherlands.
Bülent said to me, “Els, because of you, I became an “allochtoon” [immigrant]. You had also this very problematic vocabulary at that time; allochtoon and autochtoon [native], West and non-West, “golden age,” all very complex terms. Those terms determined how people saw you, how your identity should be defined. It was almost impossible to define your own identity within the borders of that wordbook. Phraseology also influenced the debates and actions that were or were not taken.
I agree with Charl that the conversations and debates on diversity, multiculturalism, or decolonial attitudes were not held in the Stedelijk Museum; it was mainly organized by the Museum of Ethnology, the Tropenmuseum, Gate Foundation, Stichting Phoenix, etcetera. Depending on the position and goals of the institutes, they were inviting Dutch—migrant—thinkers and artists, curators from ethnological museums, and/or international intellectual thinkers or curators from museums of modern art around the world.
Wim Beeren organized the exhibition U-ABC at the Stedelijk in 1989, the same year Magiciens de la terre was held in Paris. However, the Stedelijk wasn’t really interested in investing in art from places other than Europe or America, because it challenged their system, plus it was not their expertise. They could not imagine how to deal with these art histories, artists, artworks, and different debates, as they challenged their own system and expertise. They didn’t know how to deal with that. The best solution for them was to say they were not interested, or “there is no modern or contemporary art in India.”
Interest in art by artists from former colonies or with colonial roots, or from Black artists, was politicized. At a certain moment there was a political agenda pushing major cultural and social institutions to dive into art from artists with a migratory background. The government had extra money for artists and art projects with migrant histories, or artists from or with roots in our former colonies. I remember a letter from the Minister for Culture, Hedy d’Acona—she was minister in the Lubbers III government from 1989 to 1994—that stimulated institutions to invest in “diversity.” Yet a lot of museums didn’t do it, because they didn’t know how. They saw it as a threat to their “white” power position, or they thought it was not “cool.” The political solution became to support separate institutions or initiatives in order to diversify the cultural scene. But the separated or segregated funding created separated institutions, which actually hindered the success of these artists in the mainstream art world.
EM: To me it sounds as if these separate spheres of art and curatorial work were operating in parallel, yet certainly separate from the hegemonic art worlds in the Netherlands. But initiatives like the Gate Foundation provided a platform in which to show and to recognize this kind of work, as well as potentially influence mainstream institutions.
EP: We worked with international people, art experts, curators, and critics who were very active at that time on these “diverse,” “international,” “decolonial,” “multicultural” topics and international platforms, like Cuban art historian and curator Gerardo Mosquera, or British entrepreneur and art lover Robert Loder, who started Gasworks in London and the Bag Factory in Johannesburg, and Chinese curator Hou Hanru. We acted very internationally, also because in the Netherlands there were not many people knowledgeable or specialized in this field besides the ones mentioned. We invited them to activities of the Gate Foundation as curators or in debates or conferences. That had an influence. That was also the first time I connected with Sudanese art historian and curator, and later professor of art history at Cornell University, Salah Hassan, and Okwui Enwezor, at that time curator of photography.
Besides the Gate Foundation platform, there were platforms that funders created, such as Hivos, or ethnological museums. The framework of those arenas was that the context was not art and/or the quality of the artwork, but development aid, social issues, and/or ethnological or anthropological contextualization. Although they were not necessarily pushing these agendas, the contextualization was there.
Changes happened at the end of the ’80s, the beginning of the ’90s. It was, for the big institutions, very difficult to dive into; they felt threatened, or were not informed. They were at loss as to how to react to those initiatives by thought-provoking individuals. They only dared to do things when they were also happening abroad, using those international value systems of the Tate Modern, MoMA, or other respected institutions. They chose artists whom they knew were accepted in the modernist art institutes. However, there were different spheres and activities. For a long time, the “intercultural” debates were held regularly and very often. However, I didn’t have an idea that it had any big influence in the Netherlands, or that it really mattered. We all became a bit discouraged at some point. Did what we were doing make sense? Did the value and norm systems change? Did Black artists influence the mainstream white art temples? We did not see it happening. It would take another twenty years.
Of course, now I know it did matter. Now it is important that those movements become part of our art histories.
The analysis of why these separate spheres existed is interesting to research. Some researchers are taking it up, like Charl did, and I see that young researchers at the UvA for example are also diving into it. The parallel stories existing next to each other is a very Dutch history. It’s interesting to research how it developed in the Netherlands and how it has developed in London, Berlin, Paris, and other places in the world. It’s interesting to compare those movements and find out what is typical Dutch, how we also influenced international developments (like the Gate Foundation and the Prince Claus Fund) and to analyze and break down the why’s and how’s.
EM: As I’m listening to you talk about this history, it also seems as if certain emerging discourses were then pushing certain initiatives. If we understand that in 1989 certain “global” exhibitions were coming out within Europe, like Magiciens de la terre, which was co-emergent with the work of Rasheed Araeen and your work within the context of the Netherlands and Amsterdam, discourses around migration had a certain kind of traction, which might have challenged the binaries between West and non-West or the classifications that funding agencies and museums were making between art and non-art. Then discourses around diversity and multiculturalism beginning in the 1990s also begin to make small shifts, let’s say.
Interestingly, we’re returning to the topic of migration at this year’s Venice Biennale with the title Foreigners Everywhere and notions of the “other,” othering, and otherness. This Stedelijk Studies issue also comes out of the contemporary discourse and addresses Amsterdam from a decolonial, transnational perspective. How do you see these themes of migrant artists [in the Netherlands] playing into the contemporary? What are some of the advances that have been made?
EP: After I started the Gate Foundation [1987–1997], I was heading the Prince Claus Fund [1997–2011]. The Prince Claus Fund was an international organization and we had budget for funding. We could be a force in changing things internationally and in the Netherlands, because our money was meant for artists in so-called “difficult” countries in the world: countries at war, countries that were poor, countries with complex governments, or with no support for the cultural scene. However, we took care that the output in the Netherlands was also seen. For example, in 1998, we had an award for African fashion. Then, Rudi Fuchs was heading the Stedelijk. I really wanted the works in the Stedelijk to be seen, because fashion is such a great art form in Dakar and in the Sahel region. In the end, he did this as a small presentation. That mattered because the designers entered a dominant cultural institute. It helped them!
Going into the Prince Claus Fund also gave me and the artists and the people who were involved in these international movements possibilities. I tried, of course, to bring artists and/or initiatives to the Netherlands, for example, Okwui Enwezor’s exhibition Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1994. We subsidized the publication and I tried to bring the exhibition to the Netherlands. However, all the museums I approached said “no, it’s not interesting.” They even said: It’s not our history. Which, of course, is not true. On the contrary, our role in the slave trade and the political history of South Africa are also our histories. In that sense, in the ’90s it was still difficult to change attitudes, cultural systems.
Then, in 2000 and after, we organized activities on the commemoration of slavery internationally and nationally, also in the Netherlands. We published the first book on that subject in the Netherlands, Het Verleden onder Ogen [1999, Meulenhoff]. From a discussion with Curaçaoan author Martinus Arion [1936–2015], who wrote Dubbelspel, and Dutch author Adriaan van Dis during the Winternachten Festival in The Hague, the publication was born. Van Dis was member of the Board of the Prince Claus Fund, and the Winternachten conversation inspired the book. The book also supported the discussion on the necessity to put a monument for the commemoration of slavery in a prominent place. The English version of the book was called Facing the Past, Perspectives on the Commemoration of Slavery from Africa, the Americas and Europe (2001), with examples of monuments for the commemoration of slavery around the world. The latter book also published the designs for the Dutch monuments, from which a jury of experts had to choose.
The Prince Claus Fund was a royal fund, which could open many doors, especially for the artists involved, and we had budget. We were able to stimulate cultural positive change internationally and nationally.
You mentioned the current Venice Biennale Elize. In 2001 the Prince Claus Fund organized with the Forum for African Arts and the Ford Foundation the first exhibition with artists from the African continent and diaspora Authentic/Ex-centric, conceptualism in contemporary African art. The exhibition of Salah Hassan and Olu Oguibe was not allowed as part of the official Biennale presentations. When the jury wanted to allot the award of best artist to the participating artist Yinka Shonibare, it was forbidden. After much to and fro, Shonibare got the award and the show got a lot of positive attention. It was the start of a much more inclusive Biennale. This is an example of how the Prince Claus Fund was able to influence the international contemporary art developments.
If we look at the current situation, what I really embrace at the moment is the force and energy of the younger generation, and that they don’t take “no” for an answer anymore, which is very refreshing. However, it’s also something that society maybe is not ready for, and at the same time society realizes it cannot ignore the call for change anymore. This leads to that schism we discussed earlier in our conversation: the embracing of diversity and the investigation into the colonial past, and the rise of the ultra-right movement that is afraid of what’s going on.
If we look at the future, and specifically in the Netherlands, we still need to debate further on decolonial processes in the arts, on rewriting history and by whom, and becoming transparent about the position from where you start a project. We’re just at the beginning of these processes. The good thing is that we now have institutions that are more open to it than thirty to forty years ago. However, I think it will also break down institutes, create new institutions, and necessarily bring new leaders. I’m now heading the Allard Pierson and I’m sixty-four, and I realize that I’m too old to be a leader of an institution for new generations. However, if I look at my kids or kids around me, I’m worried and very optimistic at the same time. I find the new generation very bold. In that sense, I am optimistic. At the same time the new generation is very vulnerable, as is society at the moment.
EM: This comes back to the work that you’ve done, which is the role of independent initiatives, spaces, foundations, and institutions, and the kinds of relationships that they build with major hegemonic institutions. It seems as if this is really where the work is done. Although, I think the discourse around decolonization has been directed towards major institutions to decolonize their structures and their practices, which has put them in a position where they’ve had to rethink their collections and their museum practices. Currently, what independent and mainstream institutions in the Netherlands and Amsterdam would you identify as doing this kind of work, either in parallel or in collaboration?
EP: I think it’s really individuals who bring change to institutions or artistic spheres. Those individuals will create new institutions, change existing ones, and seek new opportunities. I mean, the fact that Charl is at the Stedelijk Museum is great because that will help the museum, but also the art scene and everyone connected with it, to change positively. Plus, there is a director who supports him and of course hired him.
I headed the Dutch National Opera & Ballet for eight years, which was not very aware of the necessity of decolonizing opera or ballet. Steps were taken, but very slowly. They were just doing the thing that they had done already for a long time, and they did it very well. However, take classical ballet; the discipline is built on a concept of white female bodies: ballerinas in tutus. It is an interesting question of how to break down those traditional frames without killing the art form. The ballet was an interesting case in transitioning and reforming a century-long art form with great merit and a will to change. Allowing black dancers in the company—ballet has been always very international—changed the outlook. I remember having conversations on the color of the tights, for example. Recently, Michaela DePrince died. She was one of those examples of dancers who break through walls. Like Misty Copeland, who danced as the first African American ballerina for the American Ballet Theatre.
It is very important that there are leaders or people of influence within those institutions, changing them. Now the Ministry of Culture is also saying institutions have to change by “decolonizing” the institution. The fact that the councilor for culture in Amsterdam is saying if you don’t focus on diversity and inclusion—in front and backstage—you do not receive subsidy. This will help in changing the institutions.
CL: Lastly, on the topic of these two spheres we’ve been discussing and the impossibility of these two spheres coming together. It is specifically at this moment now where we see some porousness. Things are crossing over, and in the ’80s and ’90s that was impossible. It took forty years for change to happen.
EP: In the ’80s and ’90s there was a lot of debate on migration, on diversity, on the whiteness of the art scene, but as we said, not much changed. The parallel streams of thought and discussions we talked about did not help. International developments created some changes; when El Anatsui became more internationally known, the Netherlands art scene also took him and his work more seriously. But the Netherlands was not at the forefront of these developments, caused by feelings of guilt, by ignorance, the shame of not knowing, and the hesitance of parting from positions of power.
The Gate Foundation and the Prince Claus Fund walked ahead, and were very much influenced by the developments of exhibitions and debates internationally. We went to see the Dakar Biennale, the annual international fashion show organized by Senegalese fashion designer Oumou Sy, the international biennial in Havana, the Photography Biennial in Bamako—strongly supported by the French government—and the [Jakarta] Biennale in Indonesia. Those initiatives were very influential in how I and we looked at the developments of art within the Netherlands and abroad. Also, the debates and conferences involving the thoughts and theories of Stuart Hall in England were influential. The Prince Claus Fund invited him to the Netherlands as the main speaker for a conference.
In the Netherlands, the two spheres of the “colonial migrant sphere” and the “art institutions sphere” were separated by an undefined hierarchy of position. It meant it was impossible to enter that sphere of an acknowledged art institution from the “migrant position.” Sometimes these spheres overlapped. There are a few examples.
The Prince Claus Fund, because it operated internationally by supporting artists in, for example, Mozambique, Congo, and Afghanistan, trying to push their presence in international art institutes like the Tate, MoMA, Hayward Gallery, or otherwise, could make differences for these artists and initiatives. Internationally, the Fund was followed and taken seriously. We invested a lot in the network. At the allotting of the Prince Claus Awards in the Royal Palace in Amsterdam, with the support of five-star hotels offering free rooms, we were able to build a network of professionals all around the world. They became a family of excellence. Next to that, we supported all kinds of activities and had strong bonds with the people on the ground.
I always wanted the artists or the artworks being presented [to be included] in the temples of culture and art, because then change would happen for them and they could become more independent. Now I think these institutions became more equal than before. Working for a royal fund also helped. But they were also looking at the MoMA and the Tate and saw them opening up to artists like Alfredo Jaar, El Anatsui, Ibrahim El-Salahi, and that’s when they realized they also had to do something.
CL: They were part of that internationalism. If Americans did it, we would do it.
EP: We would do it. We followed by example. That is why we are behind—in the forming of collections, the building of the right networks, and issues of trust, nationally and internationally. Although I must say that with the Gate Foundation and the Prince Claus Fund we set the agenda, especially internationally. It was harder nationally.
CL: We didn’t do European Blackness.
EP: No. We did not. That makes a figure like stanley brouwn so interesting. He understood very well the position of the artist in relation to identity. That’s why he cracked the system. The good thing about today is that, because of Black Lives Matter, the #MeToo movement, and decolonial activism, institutions have to deal with it and positively change policies, activities, but also HR and PR and communication. It is a real turnaround for individuals, for institutions, and for society. That is why there is and was so much opposition. It will create a new power balance. It does not only happen geopolitically, it also happens in art institutions and within cultural policy. Things will change for the better. We are now in the eye of the storm…
EM: That seems like a good place to end. Thank you, Els, for this conversation.
Elize Mazadiego is Assistant Professor in World Art History at the University of Bern, Switzerland. Mazadiego works on Modern and Contemporary art from a global perspective. Fields of interest include postwar modernities and contemporary practices, with a focus on Latin America, the relationship between art and politics, global conceptualism(s), artistic mobility and migration, spatial praxis, feminist and queer histories. From 2019-2023, Mazadiego was a Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellow at the University of Amsterdam and co-coordinator of the research group: Global Trajectories of Thought and Memory: Art and the Global South at the Amsterdam School of Heritage, Memory and Material Culture. She is author of Dematerialization and the Social Materiality of Art: Experimental Forms in Argentina, 1955-1968, recipient of the 2022 section award for Best Book in Latin American Visual Culture Studies from the Latin American Studies Association, and editor of Charting Space: the cartographies of conceptual art.
Els van der Plas is Director of Allard Pierson in Amsterdam since 2022, and a Member of the Board of Advisors of the Dutch Research Council since 2017. Van der Plas studied art history at the University of Utrecht and was successively founder and director of the Gate Foundation (1987-1997), first director of the Prince Claus Fund (1997-2010), director of the Netherlands Institute for Design and Fashion Premsela (2011-2012) and general director of the Dutch National Opera & Ballet (2012-2020), before becoming business director of the Bonnefanten Maastricht in 2020.
Mazadiego, Elize, and Els van der Plas. “Transnational Curatorial Practice in Amsterdam from 1970s.” Stedelijk Studies Journal 14 (2024). https://doi.org/10.54533/. This contribution is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 license.
Get the latest research, insights, and updates from Stedelijk Studies. Subscribe to the Stedelijk Museum’s Academic Newsletter.