Emptying the Shelves

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 Mirelle van Tulder, Tamarah Kerr de Haan, Clémentine Deliss and Mirjam Shatanawi, it maps the shift from densely packed cabinets to minimalist white cubes, asking what these transformations reveal about colonial legacies, restitution and repair.

At the heart of the publication lies a disquieting question: What happens to the countless objects collected, displayed and later hidden from view? Artist and designer Mirelle van Tulder approaches this history through what Rolando Vázquez calls a decolonial aesthesis: a visual and conceptual practice that challenges the modern/colonial gaze. By bringing together more than 200 archival photographs, many published for the first time, Van Tulder and her collaborators reveal how the museum’s display strategies evolved from crowded cabinets to minimalist white cubes yet remained bound to systems of representation that privilege the Western eye.

Emptying the Shelves stands as both archive and proposition: a call to confront the layered histories of ethnographic museums and to imagine new modalities of restitution, repair and relational care.