Toward a Visual Practice of Black Presencing: A Conversation with Iris Kensmil Available to Purchase

Wayne Modest is the director of content at the Wereldmuseum in the Netherlands. He is also a professor (by special appointment) of material culture and critical heritage studies at the VU University 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. He is currently working on several publication projects, including, with Peter Pels, Museum Temporalities: Time, History, and the Future of the Ethnographic Museum (forthcoming) and, with Anna Arabindan-Kesson, Beyond Boundaries: Seeing Art History from the Caribbean (forthcoming). Previous publications include the co-edited volumes Victorian Jamaica (2018); Matters of Belonging: Ethnographic Museums in a Changing Europe (2019); Spaces of Care—Confronting Colonial Afterlives in European Ethnographic Museums (2023); and Our Colonial Inheritance (2024). Among other research projects, Modest is the program leader for the Dutch Research Council funded project Pressing Matter: Ownership Value and the Question of Colonial Heritage in Museums.

Esmee Schoutens works in research and policy at the Wereldmuseum in the Netherlands. She is also an independent researcher, an editor, and a curator. She holds an MA in critical studies in art and culture from VU University Amsterdam and has worked for several modern and contemporary art institutions such as the Amsterdam Museum, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and the Marres, where she has worked on exhibitions such as In the Presence of Absence (2020–21) and The Golden Coach (2021–22). Schoutens is interested in art/technology collaborations, financial infrastructures in the arts, darkness, and art activism. Among other journals, her writing has appeared in Metropolis M and the Journal of Curatorial Studies.