MATERIAL CULTURE - Key Persons

Job Titles:

• Researcher and Research Coordinator at RCMC

Carine Zaayman is a researcher and research coordinator at RCMC. As an artist, curator and scholar she is committed to critical engagement with colonial archives and collections, specifically those holding strands of Khoekhoe pasts. Her work focuses on the afterlives of slavery and colonialism, particularly in the Cape, by bringing intangible and neglected histories into view. Her research aims to contribute to a radical reconsideration of colonial archives and museum collections, especially by assisting in finding ways to release their hold over our imaginations when we narrate the past, as well as how we might shape futures from it.

Job Titles:

• Research Associate at the RCMC

Ilaria Jessie Obata (she/her) is currently a research associate at the RCMC and holds an MA in Curating Art and Cultures from the University of Amsterdam/Vrije Universiteit, and a BA in History of Art from the University of Leeds. Her academic and professional research, as both a contemporary art historian and curator, has primarily centred around BIPOC artists, cultural theory, and film studies - as both her curatorial research and writing aims to decentre heteronormative matrixes and socio-cultural tropes. She is interested in exploring the global and local permeances of history; creating space for discussion and institutional change. Her MA thesis: Curating Difference: Race, Ethnicity, and the Supermarket - explored the shared exhibitionary logic (Bennett, 1995) between the (ethnographic) museum and the supermarket. This theory was explored through three contemporary artists that analyse the supermarket space through the mutually constituted lens of the exhibitionary complex - playing upon the relational dynamic between our everyday consumer spaces and the museum - and the shared ways in which they curate difference, through racial differencing and governance.

Job Titles:

• Director of Content National Museum of World Cultures and the Wereldmuseum Rotterdam
• Director of Content of the National Museum

Prof. dr. Wayne Modest Director of Content National Museum of World Cultures and the Wereldmuseum Rotterdam Head of the Research Center for Material Culture Wayne Modest is Director of Content of the National Museum of World Cultures (a museum group comprising the Tropenmuseum, Museum Volkenkunde, Africa Museum) and the Wereldmuseum Rotterdam, in the Netherlands. He is also professor (by special appointment) of Material Culture and Critical Heritage Studies at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. A cultural studies scholar by training, Modest works at the intersection of material culture, memory and heritage studies, with a strong focus on colonialism and its afterlives in Europe and the Caribbean. His most recent publications include the co-edited publications, Matters of Belonging: Ethnographic Museums in A Changing Europe (Sidestone Publications, 2019, together with Nick Thomas, et al), and Victorian Jamaica (Duke University Press, 2018, together with Tim Barringer). He is currently working on several publication projects including Museum Temporalities (with Peter Pels, forthcoming Routledge, 2023) and Curating the Colonial (with Chiara de Cesari, forthcoming Routledge, 2023). Modest has (co)curated several exhibitions, most recently, the Kingston Biennial (2022) entitled Pressure (together with David Scott and Nicole Smythe-Johnshon) and What We Forget (2019) with artists Alana Jelinek, Rajkamal Kahlon, Servet Kocyigit, and Randa Maroufi, an exhibition that challenged dominant, forgetful representations of Europe that erase the role of Europe's colonial past in shaping our contemporary world.