Surrounding Silences | Indentured Labour and Gender

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 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. 

• The invisible legacy of indentured labor, not only in the Indonesian socio-historical context, but also in the Hindustani context.
• Naming gendered violence within these structures of oppression through material culture and contemporary artistic practice.
• Recovering voices and solidarities that are not easily accessible or shared in academia, curatorial studies, and museum practices.

More information on the final program will follow shortly.

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).

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.