A grey room of Gold
A grey room of Gold
With the exhibition FLASH BACK the Maurits house is Celebrating 200 years of being a museum of art. A Grey Room of Gold was made not to celebrate, but to commemorate the invisibility of 400 years of colonial violence. Like the story from 1644 of six Brazilian Tarairiu men forced to perform a sacred ritual dance in front of a white Dutch audience in the Golden Room of the Maurits house. Or the forgotten letters in the Dutch archives of Pedro Poti, a Brazilian Potiguara leader and diplomate for the Dutch, writing about violence and peace. This is in contrast to the enormous scholarly interest in histories of colonial wealth. Like the 2014 scientific research of the Maurits house’s Golden Room which resulted in an archive of hundreds of photographs of microscopic cross-sections revealing 400 years of paint layers. The images are a timeline in paint. In the work a gray room of Gold shows the paint layers representing colonial wealth which juxtapose the voices of different Indigenous leaders from the past and present.
Work: Installation vitrine with 17 porcelain plates, with photographic prints.
year:2022
.
year:2022
With special thanks to
Finn Maätita -assistent researcher
Bastienne Kramer – technical advisor
Yvonne van Versendaal -graphic designer
Carolina Monteiro – advisor Brazilian colonial histories
Margriet Eikema Hommes- art historian specialized in historical painting techniques.
Mauritshuis team:
directeur Mauritshuis Martine Gosselink
Curator Hedwig Wosten
Senior Curator Quentin Buvelot
Coördinator Tentoonstellingstechniek Boy van den Hoorn
