Public Programs @ the Institute
Series: South-East Asian Connections: Art, History and Archipelagos
Mirjam Shatanawi, Indonesia’s Islamic heritage and the aftermath of colonialism
Thursday, September 25, 2025, 6:30pm
In 1935, the influential Dutch archaeologist Willem Stutterheim (1892–1942) wrote that Islamic art had hardly gained ground in the Indonesian archipelago, and that its influence was in fact limited to a few old-style mosques and the use of Arabic script on a number of gravestones. During the period of Dutch rule in the region, Dutch intellectuals and colonial officials shared similar views, asserting that Islam had only a superficial influence on artistic and cultural production.
This talk examines the historical reasons behind the marginalization of Indonesia within the field of Islamic art, in relation to colonialism in Southeast Asia. Drawing on Mirjam Shatanawi’s recent book Legacies of Colonialism in Museum Collections: The (Un)Making of Indonesian Islam in the Netherlands (Brill, 2024) and delving into colonial archives, it traces the journey of Indonesian objects into museums, exploring their original meanings and their re-appropriation through collecting, classification, interpretation, and public display. Shatanawi’s work reveals that this erasure is rooted in multiple, interlocking perceptions formed during the colonial period, resulting in exclusion from both artistic and ethnographic narratives. Historical divides between “art” and “ethnographic” museums, and between conceptions of “Asia” and “Islam,” left Indonesian Islamic heritage stranded between categories.
By uncovering these legacies, the talk calls for a rethinking of classifications and considers what the case of Indonesia reveals about the various meanings attached to Islam as a religion, culture, and artistic practice.
Mirjam Shatanawi is UNESCO Chair of Museum Collections, Repatriation and Interculturality and Senior Lecturer at the Reinwardt Academy (Amsterdam University of the Arts) and a researcher at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) in Leiden. Between 2001 and 2018, she worked as a curator at the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam, the Museum of Ethnology in Leiden, the Afrika Museum in Nijmegen and the Wereldmuseum in Rotterdam. She is the author of Legacies of Colonialism in Museum Collections: The (Un)Making of Indonesian Islam in the Netherlands (Brill, 2024), Islam at the Tropenmuseum (LM Publishers, 2014), Islam in Beeld (SUN, 2008) and co-editor of Islam and Heritage in Europe: Pasts, Presents and Future Possibilities (Routledge, 2021).
This event, part of the series, South-East Asian Connections: Art, History and Archipelago, is supported by the Institute’s Gulnar Bosch Fund.
Organized by Finbarr Barry Flood, Dipti Khera, and Prita Meier.
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