"Our colonial heritage" exhibition at the World Museum

Since opening in 2022, the permanent exhibition has been taking Our colonial legacy takes you through more than 1,200 m² of history and current ideas. The museum - once the Tropenmuseum and founded as a showcase for colonial possessions - now turns against that very narrative and shows how deeply colonialism still affects language, institutions and social relations.

In ten themes - from trade and labor to resistance and resilience - discover hundreds of objects: from common utensils to traditional garments, as well as photo series, paintings and contemporary art that expose the legacy of exploitation. At the window slavery you will learn about direct traces of the transatlantic slave trade and its associated resistance through three key figures.

What stands out is how the museum carefully works in conjunction with communities of origin - From Indonesia to CARICOM regions - to provide a multi-voiced and honest perspective. This includes space for artists such as Elia Nurvista or Max Kisman, who in Unfinished Past reflect on how that past is still visible today

"Colonialism lives on. It is not something of the past."

This becomes palpable: shared cuisine, language, even social structures - think patterns of inequality and exclusion - appear to be deeply engrained in our daily lives. Daar addition, the museum offers educational materials, podcasts (Long-winded), films, or projections about institutional racism in the Netherlands, for which police and schools, among others, use part of the programming.