The Hague museum wants to show how the Dutch East Indies lives on

The exhibition OUR LAND – Decolonization, generations, stories opens in Museum Sophiahof in The Hague on Friday. According to the initiators, it is an exhibition that shows how the former colony of the Dutch East Indies continues to live on in Dutch society today.

The exhibition is set up as a journey from the present to the 1950s. It mainly revolves around personal family stories of the different generations. “The youngest generation shows how they manage to turn their family story into a strength,” says the museum. According to Sophiahof, we look at it from as many perspectives as possible.

Light also plays an important role. “Anyone who was ever in Indonesia knows that the light there is very different than in the Netherlands. Light and color are therefore used here as a mirror of emotion and atmosphere. In one room, the Netherlands is captured in a cacophony of images and sound of cultural and political issues. In another room, a chilly, bleak Dutch winter world forms the setting for migration stories, where the reception in the Netherlands was usually not exactly experienced as heartwarming.”

many faces

Historical interpretation and context is provided with interactive screens, infographics, an accompanying audio tour and a booklet. The stories in the exhibition do not provide a complete picture, says Sophiahof, but they show “in a very personal and intimate way that the Dutch East Indies is a story with many faces.”

Revolusi starts next week at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam! Indonesia independent, an exhibition about Indonesia’s independence struggle based on the stories of eyewitnesses. About Revolution! and whether or not to use the term ‘bersiap’ there was already a lot of uproar in advance. This term is used in our country for the violent period during the struggle for independence and is said to be “not entirely free from racial hatred”, according to one of the compilers, because “primitive, uncivilized Indonesians are always presented as perpetrators of the violence”. Many Dutch people suffered greatly from the bersiap.