Ten museums receive grant for provenance research into colonial collections

This provenance research focuses on the non-ceramic Indonesia collection “Indische Kunst”, which was collected by Nanne Ottema, the founder of the Ceramics Museum.

Kunstmuseum Den Haag is conducting research into the eighteenth-century court silver of the Sultan of Ternate from the precious metal collection and two nineteenth-century Indonesian gongs from the music collection.

This provenance research that will be carried out revolves around an honorary robe with Baxian motifs from Yanggu (China) that was brought by missionaries in 1901 under unclear circumstances.

This museum has a Benin Bronze in its collection. It was probably stolen from the Kingdom of Benin in 1897. It has been part of the collection since 1937 through founder Dirk Hannema.

The museum will examine twelve objects from the Nusantara collection to shed light on the colonial history of Delft and the story of the ‘Indische instelling’.

The provenance research focuses on the Ethnographica sub-collection, where seven objects are currently linked to the Senufo (West Africa).

The provenance research will be conducted in collaboration with SAHRA and will focus on the acquisition of human and ancestral remains originating from South Africa. The museum would like to know to which specific communities these human and ancestral remains belong.

Stichting Budaya Kita will investigate ancestral remains from the Aru Islands, an archipelago within the Moluccas. The ancestral remains are in the collections of Museum Vrolik and Wereldmuseum.

This provenance research focuses on seven objects from the Veterinary Medicine collection to map the colonial history between the Utrecht faculty and the Nederlandsch-Indische Veeartsenijschool (Dutch East Indies Veterinary School).