News

Does your museum manage collections and objects from colonial contexts and would you like to do provenance research on these? The Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science has made budget available for provenance research on colonial collections. A total of EUR 500,000 is available that will be awarded to provenance research projects.

In response to a request from Indonesia, the Netherlands is returning 288 objects from the Dutch State Collection to Indonesia. These objects were wrongfully taken to the Netherlands during the colonial period and are of cultural interest to Indonesia. Experts and organisations in the field of museums and collections in both countries collaborated intensively to make this return possible.

Wereldmuseum, partner of the Colonial Collections Consortium, is looking for a Project Officer who will help implement the Provenance Research Grants. Do you have experience working on restitution, repatriation and provenance reseach cases and are you familar with the Dutch policy? Then we invite you to apply.

NWO has awarded funding to 11 research within the call ‘Research into collections with a colonial context’. Dutch museum collections may contain looted objects with a colonial context. This programme aims to redress injustice and strengthen trust and cooperation with the countries of origin.

In September, the first two fellows of the NIAS-NIOD-KITLV Moving Objects, Mobilising Culture in the Context of (De)colonisation start their research projects. The fellowship enables researchers and heritage professionals from former colonized countries to conduct five months of research into collections that arrived in the Netherlands in the context of colonialism.

The Call for Applications for the exchange programme Sharing Stories on Contested Histories is now open. The 2024 edition will explore how striving for equity may look like in our work, by stimulating and facilitating an exchange of knowledge, tools and experiences regarding our professional practices.

At the beginning of April, a Netherlands delegation visited Suriname, during which agreements were made about cooperation in the field of colonial collections. For this visit, the Colonial Collections Consortium mapped out which objects are present in Dutch public collections through the colonial history of the Netherlands and Suriname.

Provenance research is an important part of collection management. On Wednesday 10 April, more than 100 institutions from the international field pay extra attention to this during International Provenance Research Day with publications and activities such as guided tours and presentations.

Nuffic announces the launch of the Cultural Heritage scholarship programme. This initiative, funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, is designed to empower young professionals from Indonesia, Nigeria, Sri Lanka, Suriname, and South Africa to enhance their knowledge of cultural heritage management.

Moving objects, Mobilising Culture in the Context of (De)colonization is funded by the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, and intended for researchers from formerly colonised countries – including heritage practitioners, historians, archaeologists, social scientists, artists, journalists, and/or cultural activists – with an interest in (lost) collections or objects from those countries or regions that are kept in the Netherlands.

A team of the Rijksmuseum and the consortium developed a way to synchronise dat between applications from the museum and the consortium.

At the end of November, a saber of famous Indonesian resistance hero Diponegoro resurfaced in Het Loo Palace. The blade of the saber was most likely part of the personal weapon of the prince with a legendary reputation, who fought the Dutch colonial rule.

The expertise of researchers from countries of origin is crucial for the study of objects and collections from a colonial context present in Dutch museums. Partly as a result of these issues, a new call for proposals has now been developed within programme line 2 of the NWA (‘National Science Agenda’): ‘Research on collections with a colonial context’.

The Colonial Collections Consortium has been awarded a subsidy of 3.1 million euros. With this working budget, the Consortium will actively focus on collection accessibility, knowledge sharing and collaboration. This happens within the Consortium and in collaboration with museums, collection-managing institutions, the advisory committee, countries of origin, and other countries where similar collections are present.

Following the submission by Sri Lanka of its claim for the restitution of the six objects, the decision to return them was made by the Dutch Secretary of State for Culture and Media. In the context of this restitution, the Consortium is working on a long-term multi-year knowledge exchange program in collaboration with the National Museum in Colombo.