As museums around the world continue to grapple with the issue of how to ethically house or return human remains, the Wereldmuseum Amsterdam has suggested that a new space for “ritual practices” could be created to house its collection of body parts, until a more permanent solution is found.
At the opening of the exhibition Unfinished past: return, keep, or…?, the Wereldmuseum’s director of content, Wayne Modest, said the institution has decided not to publicly exhibit any of the human remains in its collection, amassed during Dutch colonial times, across its three locations.
“We have chosen not to show any human remains,” he confirmed. “And that is a push with a lot of different museums. For us it is a complex story because physical anthropology is one of the important departments. We don’t do it anymore but we still have around 4,000 different parts of people in the depot. And the question is: what do we do with them?”
The Dutch government is a front-runner in policy to repatriate colonial items “involuntarily lost by the countries of origin”, but has not yet published guidelines on human remains, which range from unidentified skulls to a Surinamese newborn baby preserved in formaldehyde.
Modest said that one of the ongoing questions for the museum is whether, in future, it could create a space for “ritual practices, where people can come and be with their ancestors” or “a space that is respectful, until a solution is found”.
The exhibition includes Pansee Atta's To Make One Particle, which reproduces every body part in the museum’s collection as a small wooden token
Photographer: Les Adu
The exhibition, which opened in May, includes commissions from contemporary artists as well as insights from a four-year international research programme, Pressing Matter. The show examines how colonial artefacts were acquired in the name of science; toxic conservation techniques such as killing insects with DDT; and the question of who might “take back” ancient bodily remains of unclear origin.
An artwork by Pansee Atta, To Make One Particle, reproduces every body part in the museum’s collection as a small wooden token—with descriptions such as “bone (human), pre 1953, Oceania” or “skull, pre-1951, Middle and South America” and an invitation to the visitor to order them.
“It’s what Michael Rothberg calls [being] implicated,” said Modest. “When you begin to organise things, what does that mean for your power over them? ... It raises the question: how do we take responsibility for pasts that we were not a part of?”
The Dutch museums are of course not the only ones with a colonial collection of human remains. The French state returned 20 Māori ancestral heads to New Zealand in 2012 and in 2023 brought in a law to facilitate the return of human remains to their countries of origin. This led to skulls thought to belong to 24 Algerian resistance fighters being sent to Algeria in 2020, and six other people’s remains—once shown in Parisian zoos—to French Guiana in 2024.
Meanwhile the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac in Paris, which displays items owned by the French state, has a vast provenance project to retrace the history of objects, carried out alongside scientific teams in their country of origin, to find out if they were acquired in an uncertain or illicit way. The exhibition Mission Dakar-Djibouti (1931-1933): Counter-Investigations, which opened to the public in April, is the result of one such project carried out in collaboration with professionals from six African countries.
However, there is little sign of change at the British Museum in London. The institution referred The Art Newspaper to its website, which says it “holds and cares for human remains from around the world”, has some of the 6,000 body parts on display, and has a collection of essays—published in 2014—on “the issues”. The museum’s website says: “Surveys show that most visitors are comfortable with and expect to see human remains as an element of our museum displays.”
But Modest believes his museum has a moral responsibility to tackle difficult questions—including those surrounding human remains. “It is our colonial history so it is about us as a museum,” he said. “But it is also about us as a society.”
