ART SCIENCE dialogue with Marcos Kueh, Ritvik Khushu, Amisah Bakuri and Elsbeth Dekker | September 10, 4.15 PM
Join us for the first ART SCIENCE dialogue of Realms of Reality with artists Marcos Kueh and Ritvik Khushu and researchers Amisah Bakuri and Elsbeth Dekker. Miranda van Holland will be moderating. The conversation forms part of a collaboration with 3D and will take place in the gallery.
The dialogue will delve into themes and topics present in the presentation by Kueh and Khushu in the gallery. As such, the conversation will explore the intricacies between religion and colonialism as well as its impact on perceptions of gender and sexuality, and the intertwining of status, cultural norms and economic determinism.
Marcos Kueh is an artist from Sarawak, Borneo Malaysia, currently living and working in the Netherlands. His practice centres on textiles as a medium for storytelling — drawing from Borneo’s ancestral weaving traditions to explore themes of identity, labour, and globalisation. Kueh holds a Bachelor’s in Graphic and Textile Design from the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague. His works are held in the collections of Museum Voorlinden and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Recent exhibitions include Manifesta 15 in Barcelona, Kunstinstituut Melly in Rotterdam, The Backroom in Kuala Lumpur, and the National Art Gallery Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur.
Ritvik Khushu is a Kashmiri artist-researcher based between the Netherlands and India. Situated at the intersections of material culture, memory and histories of extraction, his practice explores the ways in which histories and knowledges are carried, displaced and remembered through objects, materials and embodied practices. His work encounters objects, knowledges and materials held within ethno-colonial museum and archival collections as sites of dispossession and memory. Through archival research and fieldwork, he follows their histories across the institutional spaces in which they have been collected and the communities among whom their memories, practices and meanings continue to live.His work focuses on issues of restitution beyond the return of cultural objects, attending to the histories, knowledges, and world-making practices disrupted through their extraction.
Amisah Bakuri assistant Professor at VU Amsterdam, at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Lived Religion and Society. Her interdisciplinary research explores the intersections of religion, culture, identity, and sexuality. Her current work focuses on the historical legacies of missionary Christianity, colonialism, and slavery, and how they shape the religious identities of descendants of enslaved and colonised communities in the Netherlands. She is also the author of “Religious Sensibilities in Pursuit of Sexual Well-Being: African Diasporic Communities in the Netherlands“, which examines the intersection of religion, sexuality, and well-being within African diasporic communities in the Netherlands. Recently, she published “Healing Beyond Borders: Well-being, Religion, and Migration in Postcolonial Netherlands.” .
Elsbeth Dekker is a PhD candidate in Legal Theory and Legal History at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She graduated in Law and Art History. Her research is embedded within the NWO-project ‘Pressing Matter: Ownership, Value and the Question of Colonial Heritage in Museums’ and focuses on museum collections in relation to property structures and practices to redress historical injustices.
Miranda van Holland was trained as an art historian and anthropologist in Utrecht and Nijmegen. After a career in radio broadcasting and event hosting she returned to the academic world to study religion and media. She now works at the Vrije Universiteit where she runs the dialogue and debate centre called 3D. She coordinates the largest student community program at VU called Life is Better in 3D and is the team lead for NEWConnective, a team of young program makers that offer program and conversation on life’s bigger questions, grief, meditation and interreligious dialogue.
Programme
4.15 PM | Doors open & possibility to view exhibition
4.30 PM | ART SCIENCE dialogue with speakers and audience
5.30 PM | Closing
Admission is free