Emptying the Shelves

Emptying the Shelves traces how Dutch ethnographic museums – among them the Dutch National Museum of World Cultures and its predecessors – have shaped and reshaped their displays over the past century. Drawing on a trove of archival exhibition photographs and contemporary essays, it charts the transition from crowded cabinets to austere white cube displays, with most objects now in storage facilities. With texts by Tamarah Kerr de Haan, Clémentine Deliss and Mirjam Shatanawi, this publication examines what it means to engage with these objects today and how their silence is intimately connected to colonial legacies, restitution and repair.