The Research Center for Material Culture and the Wereldmuseum Amsterdam are delighted to host a public event on Surrounding Silences - an artist talk and panel discussion with Sabine Groenewegen, Rachael Rakes, Priya Swamy, and a video recording by Gyonne Goedhoop. The conversation will be moderated by Carine Zaayman. This round table conversation is a furtherance of the exhibition Imprints in Wereldmuseum Amsterdam.
Disclaimer: As the talk is centred around the video work by Sabine Groenewegen, we ask that you visit the work before the event begins. For more information on the exhibition and installation please visit: Imprints | Wereldmuseum Amsterdam. Registration for this event will guarantee you free entry into the museum to visit the work.
This event will be in English.
| 14.00 - 14.15 | Entry and registration (with opportunity to visit the installation) |
|---|---|
|
14.15 - 14.25 |
Welcome words by Ilaria Obata and Carine Zaayman |
| 14.25 - 14.45 | Sabine Groenewegen |
| 14.45 - 15.05 | Rachael Rakes |
| 15.05 - 15.25 | Priya Swamy |
| 15.25 - 15.40 | Video recording Gyonne Goedhoop |
| 15.40 - 16.30 | Panel discussion and public Q&A moderated by Carine Zaayman |
| 16.30 - 16.35 | Closing remarks by Ilaria Obata |
| 16.35 | End of program |
LAST CHANCE: This artist talk and panel discussion is part of the public program for the exhibition Imprints - Elia Nurvista, Max Kisman and Sabine Groenewegen in Wereldmuseum Amsterdam. The exhibition has now been extended until March 2nd 2025, and this conversation offers a final opportunity to our visitors and public to critically engage with exhibition, the video work of Sabine Groenewegen, and the chance to participate in a public Q&A with the speakers and artist.
This public event will engage with three different thematic threads, which will be further explored through the round table conversation that will follow the four presentations.
Sabine Groenewegen is an award-winning filmmaker and artist. Her debut film Odyssey (2018) won the Doc Alliance Selection Award - a joint award from seven leading documentary festivals for best newcomer. A sci-fi found footage, the film unpacks constructions of whiteness and racial hierarchy in the Dutch national imaginary. Her work has been screened at festivals including FIDMarseille, Cinéma du Réel, DocLisboa and shown at venues including BOZAR Brussels and ICA: Institute of Contemporary Art London, 1646 and Kunstfort Vijfhuizen. Her short film Remanence (2024) entwines never before seen archive footage with rare testimonies to uncover a forgotten 1930’s women’s anti-war movement. At Wereldmuseum Amsterdam she shows the installation Surrounding Silences, part of a larger research project in which she traces omitted histories of Asian women under indentured labor in North East Sumatra under Dutch colonial rule.
Rachael Rakes is a researcher, writer, independent curator, and educator. Her work challenges organizing logics of contemporary globalized life through exhibitions, publications, programs, and transnational collaborations. Recently, Rakes was the Artistic Director of the 12th Seoul Mediacity Biennale, THIS, TOO, IS A MAP; Curator of Public Practice at BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht; and Head Curator and Programme at De Appel, Amsterdam. She is a 2024-2025 UnDo collaborative research Fellow and part of the New York Film Festival selection committee. With artists Laura Huertas Millán and Onyeka Igwe, she organizes Counter-Encounters, a research collaborative centering encounter as a site of agency and knowledge transformation; and with Xenia Benivolski, leads the project VESSELS, positioning musical instruments as material witnesses and catalysts of social change. She lectures at Sandberg Institut and Leiden University and recently at KASK, The New School, Zine Eskola, and Harvard University. Among other publications, Rakes is co-editor of Toward the Not-Yet (BAK/MIT Press, 2022) and Practice Space (NAME/De Appel, 2020).
Priya Swamy is curator, Globalization and South Asia at the Wereldmuseum. Priya holds a BA in World Religions from McGill University (Canada) and an MPhil and PhD in Area Studies from Leiden University. Her research critically engages with the ways in which people in and from South Asian diasporas innovate and rearticulate their religious and political beliefs across historical moments and social contexts. In order to trouble Hindu nationalist rhetoric, her work has focused on diasporic locations such as Suriname and the Netherlands, where Hindu material culture and religious practice can help us construct alternative narratives and histories of religion and ritual.
Carine Zaayman is a researcher and research coordinator at the RCMC. As an artist, curator and scholar, she is committed to critical engagement with colonial archives and collections, specifically those holding strands of Khoekhoe pasts. Her work focuses on the afterlives of slavery and colonialism, particularly in the Cape, by bringing intangible and neglected histories into view. Her research aims to contribute to a radical reconsideration of colonial archives and museum collections, especially by assisting in finding ways to release their hold over our imaginations when we narrate the past, as well as how we might shape futures from it.
Gyonne is rooted in the Caribbean, and holds a critical eye of the world. She creates programs, podcasts, exhibitions and provides strategic advice from a historical and Caribbean contextualization. She currently focuses primarily on projects within Counter/Narratives -such as Archival Horizons/Archivo Emergente- and BE RIGHT BACK | BAI BIN the Podcast.
She also works as a strategic cultural consultant in which she helps organizations in transition management, fundraiser and grant advisor. She prefers to spend the rest of her time on a bench somewhere in the sun.
