Centering on figures such as Dutch consul and diplomat Albertus Paulus Hermanus Hotz (1855–1930), American heiress and traveler Josephine Powell (1919–2007), and renowned Dutch Orientalist Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje (1857–1936), the film examines the ideological and material processes through which West Asian artifacts were “collected” and institutionalized in the Netherlands. These objects—now held in prominent collections including, but not limited to, the Wereldmuseum in Rotterdam, the Turkish Cabinet at the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, and the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden in Leiden—serve as portals through which the film interrogates the museum as a site of both knowledge production and colonial amnesia.
Filmed on-site in museum depots and collections, Monster (van Hollandabad) proposes epistemic repair as a framework for unsettling dominant museological narratives and confronting the afterlives of colonial heritage while revealing the fragile conditions under which cultural memory is curated, obscured, and contested.
A collaboration between Gelare Khoshgozaran and Hande Sever, Monster (van Hollandabad) is the result of an artist residency as part of Pressing Matter: Ownership, Value and the Question of Colonial Heritage in Museums.
