The exhibition Valkenburg by Willem de Rooij reveals how the Dutch elite in the eighteenth century used visual culture to promote and perpetuate colonial ideology. In a comprehensive installation, where 25 works by Dirk Valkenburg are presented together for the first time, De Rooij investigates how visual culture was strategically employed.

Appropriation and Collaboration

Since the early 1990s, Willem de Rooij (b. 1969, Netherlands) has created temporary installations that analyze the politics of representation through appropriation and collaboration. His meticulously crafted publications and objects reflect his research in art history and visual anthropology.

With his experience in film and sound, De Rooij uses montage as a method for presenting appropriated images and objects, creating new meanings between seemingly disparate elements.

Dirk Valkenburg

In the early eighteenth century, Dutch painter Dirk Valkenburg (1675-1721) worked in Suriname for seven years. On the sugar plantations, he created images of enslaved Africans and indigenous inhabitants for wealthy colonial patrons.

The works Valkenburg made in Suriname are among the earliest of their kind and exist alongside his lesser-known hunting still lifes and portraits of the colonial elite. This visual diversity offers insight into the functioning of the ‘white gaze.’

Catalogue

Accompanying the exhibition is the first complete publication on the oeuvre of Dirk Valkenburg: a ‘catalogue raisonné,’ developed in collaboration with the RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History. The publication is compiled by Willem de Rooij and historian Karwan Fatah-Black (Leiden University), a specialist in slavery and colonial history. The publication includes fifteen new essays by international scholars and thinkers in the fields of art history, colonialism, ecology, queer, and postcolonial studies.

Willem de Rooij

Willem de Rooij studied at the University of Amsterdam, the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Since 2006, he has been a professor of Fine Arts at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main, and since 2015, an advisor at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. In 2016, he co-founded BPA// Berlin program for artists and became a member of the Akademie van Kunsten.

In 2000, De Rooij won the Baloise Art Prize, and he was nominated for the Hugo Boss Award (2004) and the Vincent Award (2014). He was a Robert Fulton Fellow at Harvard University in 2004 and a DAAD fellow in Berlin in 2006. In 2005, he represented the Netherlands at the Venice Biennale together with Jeroen de Rijke (1970–2006), with whom he collaborated from 1994 to 2006 under the name De Rijke / De Rooij.

Recent solo exhibitions include King Vulture (Akademie der bildenden Künste, Vienna), Pierre Verger in Suriname (Portikus, Frankfurt am Main), Whiteout (KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin), Ebb Rains (IMA, Brisbane), Entitled (MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main), and The Impassioned No (Consortium, Dijon). Recent group exhibitions include steirischer herbst (Graz), Errata (MAIIAM, Chiang Mai), Mindful Circulations (BDL Museum, Mumbai), Stories of Almost Everyone (Hammer Museum, Los Angeles), the Jakarta Biennale 2017, EVA International – Ireland’s Biennial (Limerick), the 10th Shanghai Biennale, and Hollandaise (Raw Material Company, Dakar).

Willem de Rooij’s work is included in the collections of institutions such as the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), Mumok (Vienna), Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin), Centre Pompidou (Paris), MOCA (Los Angeles), and MoMA (New York).