A visit to the recently renovated Africa Museum in Tervuren, in preparation of our project in South Africa, Waterberg Private Wildlife Reserve.

We welcome you to the April 2023 Edition of “Through Different Eyes“.

All year around, Brinkman Fine Real Estate invites you into a carefully curated portfolio of properties in The Netherlands and beyond, each one a masterpiece of architectural distinction.

We look forward to seeing you soon.

Exhibition Hall in the Africa Museum, Tervuren.

THE AFRICA MUSEUM IN TERVUREN

Following the publication of our project in South Africa, Waterberg Private Wildlife Reserve, to which we invite you further down in this June edition of “Through Different Eyes”, we recently visited the renovated Africa Museum in Tervuren.

The 1910 museum was outdated and the exhibition anachronistic. Therefore, it closed in 2013 for a thorough renovation and reopened in 2018. The museum’s site states, “… The biggest challenge of the renovation project was to paint a picture of contemporary Africa in a museum building with a colonial past…”.

Work was done with great respect for the late 19th century landmark building to create a modern museum with the amenities needed today. A new reception building leads visitors through an underground corridor to the old building. In this corridor, the museum’s new direction is laid out and explained. For example, it is explained that some display cases have a sticker that says “looted art” and what that means. In the exhibition, the objects in the museum’s collection are provided with context and people explain the use of the objects in videos. The layout of the exhibition is new but it also uses, for example, the monumental display cases that belong to the building.

Contemporary artists have been asked to create works for the new permanent exhibition using the museum collection as a starting point while giving it a new interpretation. Especially for the places that had a distinctly colonial atmosphere. The large rotunda, the central hall in the museum, overlooking the beautiful garden, was a place that provoked much criticism. In the four corners of the rotunda are placed large colonial statues. Consideration was given to removing these statues but the government’s Real Estate Department pointed out that the artworks were an integral part of the protected building and therefore could not be removed. A collaboration between an African and a Belgian artist produced a solution that opens the visitor’s eyes in a surprising way. By hanging semi-transparent canvases on which contemporary images are printed a short distance from the existing sculptures, both are experienced simultaneously. As the site states, “… A new reading of a heavy legacy becomes possible and questions its historical and ideological content…”.

Thus, the renovation of the building and the renewed collection gives us the opportunity to see history from a new perspective. Exhibiting colonial art opposite contemporary art about colonialism creates a dialogue between past events and contemporary thoughts. The Afrika Museum gives us the opportunity to look through different eyes at the history, by connecting it to the present time, thus shining new light on the past.

Text: Ir. Nannette de Jong, Conservation Architect