Expo Shadows on the Atlantic Ocean at The Maritime Museum

Sometimes a museum needs an exhibition that turns its own story upside down. Shadows on the Atlantic is just such an exhibition. Opening on Sept. 27, 2024 as a permanent part of The Maritime Museum, she examines how the glorious Dutch shipping history was inextricably linked to colonial violence and the transatlantic slave trade. Not as a footnote, but as the core of the story.

The eye-catching object is a ship model of D'Cologne Galy, two meters long and based on a 17th-century ship used to transport enslaved people from West Africa to the colonies in America. Next to this model are paintings from the 17th and 18th centuries from the museum's permanent collection. Familiar, beautiful canvases, but now with a different context. Guest curator Dyonna Bennett led the curatorial process, ensuring that this recontextualization did not remain superficial. To do so, she worked with experts from communities that still experience the effects of the colonial past on a daily basis. Even the choice of words in the exhibition was carefully developed with those communities.

Four visual artists created new work especially for the exhibition. Atong Atem, Manuwi C Tokai, Robin Hoed and Wouter Pocornie each added a contemporary layer to the historical objects. Their work makes visible the effect of the past in the present in a way that archival objects alone cannot. In his photo series, photographer Lisandro Suriel explores the shared African identity of descendants of enslaved people, and those images give faces to a history that remained anonymous for too long.

The interactive name map, where visitors can provide missing names of enslaved people, shows that this is not a closed chapter.

The Maritime Museum is in a monumental 17th-century building on Kattenburg, the former ’s Lands Zeemagazijn. That building was once a logistical heart of the VOC trade. Now it houses an exhibition that doesn't celebrate that past but confronts it. The interactive map of names, where visitors can submit missing names of enslaved people, shows that this is not a closed chapter. The museum is open daily from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.