In 2015, Haarlem's Frans Hals Museum and Leuven's M Museum co-organized a conference titled The Transhistorical Museum. In this conference, transhistorical display was defined as a museum strategy... Show moreIn 2015, Haarlem's Frans Hals Museum and Leuven's M Museum co-organized a conference titled The Transhistorical Museum. In this conference, transhistorical display was defined as a museum strategy to transcend conventional taxonomical and chronological categorization by juxtaposing objects made in different periods and from different cultural-geographical contexts to make specific curatorial statements and engage the audiences. Transhistorical presentations are in fashion in today's museum world, and yet bringing together historic and modern/contemporary (art) objects is nothing new. This display strategy can be traced back to cooperation between museums and contemporary artists in the twentieth century. At the same time, exhibition criticism turned from the objects on display towards the displays themselves. As postcolonial theory entered the field of museum studies in the 1980s, transhistorical curation also became a medium for museums to reflect on their exhibition mechanisms and to critically examine colonial collections. This article focuses on a particular transhistorical juxtaposition found in the semi-permanent exhibition Our Colonial Inheritance at Amsterdam's Tropenmuseum (opened 2022): a nineteenth-century diorama of sugar plantation in Suriname and the digitally modified photography, Madame Beauvoir's Painting (2017), by Haitian artist Fabiola Jean-Louis. It explores how the juxtaposition acts to visualize colonial continuity; that is, the ongoing impact of colonial history on present society. This case study also demonstrates how important it is for museums to study their exhibition histories in order to expand the critical dimension of their transhistorical displays. Show less
