Emptying the Shelves traces how Dutch ethnographic museums, including 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 by Tamarah Kerr de Haan, Clémentine Deliss and Mirjam Shatanawi, artist and designer Mirelle van Tulder maps the shift from densely packed cabinets to minimalist white cubes, asking what these transformations reveal about colonial legacies, restitution and repair.
Emptying the Shelves serves as both an archive and a call to confront the layered histories of ethnographic museums and find new ways of dealing with them.
Mirelle van Tulder & eds., Framer Framed & Roots to Fruits, 2025, 528 pages, ills. colour & bw, 13,5 x 19 cm, softcover, English
