How do you deal with a family history that is tightly interwoven with our colonial past? In the exhibition Generasi 3.0 – The Stories We Carry, nine photographers, artists and makers delve into their family histories, which are rooted in the former Dutch East Indies. The search for a better understanding of their origins transcends their individual journeys. Their stories contribute to a broader public debate about the centuries-long colonialization of the Indonesian archipelago by the Netherlands, touching on painful issues such as slavery, war and violence, forced migration and their legacy today.
All the artists belong to the third generation: born in the Netherlands but with roots in the former colony. Their parents or grandparents were born in the archipelago or worked there and came to the Netherlands at some point in their lives, sometimes against their will. Now, with more distance from the painful events of the colonial period, this third generation is investigating the role their family’s past plays in their lives – and how it shapes who they are today.
Generasi 3.0 – The Stories We Carry opens on 11 October and features works by Caja Boogers, Sander Coers, Yara Jimmink, Miranda Devita Kistler, Sebastian & Tyler Koudijzer, Ilvy Njiokiktjien, Sekan and Maarten Tromp. Through this exhibition and the accompanying public programme, the Fotomuseum Den Haag aims to increase the visibility of, and open up conversations about these histories.
“The knowledge that some two million Dutch people have roots in the former Dutch East Indies makes you realise the importance of making room for other perspectives on this layered history. Especially in The Hague, a city that has always had close links with the former Dutch East Indies.” – Margriet Schavemaker, director of the Fotomuseum Den Haag and the Kunstmuseum Den Haag
“People of my generation are looking at colonial history from a new perspective – not as a closed chapter, but as something that continues to influence our families, our identities and cultural imagination.” – Nienke Coers, guest researcher for Generasi 3.0 – The Stories We Carry
Family photos as a point of departure The exhibition unfolds as a journey through the artists’ personal stories. Often, a tangible trace opens the door to something more elusive: a memory, a sense of connection or a loss. For Caja Boogers, Sander Coers and Ilvy Njiokiktjien, their search began with their family albums. What value does a photo have if the memory is gone? Photos from more than a hundred years ago led Ilvy Njiokiktjien to a house on Laan van Meerdervoort in The Hague, where her Chinese Indonesian grandfather was sent as a child to be raised by a German Dutch couple.
Sander Coers uses artificial intelligence to create “phantom” memories. He feeds images from his family albums and photographs taken during trips to the Maluku Islands into an algorithm. The resulting images do not represent actual lived moments but instead form an associative memory landscape.
For his paintings, Caja Boogers selected photographs from an old family album and public archives. Each panel features only small details of the photos, like a mouth, a hand, or a batik pattern. In this way, he gives tangible form to the fragmented nature of memories and explores the role nostalgia plays in them.
Economic legacy How do you reconcile the riches of colonialism with the exploitation and oppression on which it was based? Yara Jimmink, born in Amsterdam with roots on the Banda Islands, shows how these islands and the Netherlands were inextricably linked through the nutmeg trade in the seventeenth century. The wealth that the Dutch East India Company accumulated from this trade, still visible in Amsterdam today, was accompanied by extreme violence against the Indigenous population. Jimmink works with personal photos and archival materials, constructing numerous layers to make visible the ever-present consequences of colonialism.
Maarten Tromp also focuses on this economic legacy. In 1936, his great-grandfather led a Dutch expedition to Puncak Jaya (Carstensz Pyramid) in Dutch New Guinea (now Papua), where large deposits of gold ore were discovered. In the 1970s, under Indonesian administration, this led to the establishment of the Freeport mine: for many years the largest gold mine in the world. Since 2010, Tromp has made regularly trips to Papua. Against the backdrop of the extraction of natural resources as part of the colonial system, he focuses on the local communities and their relationship with their land. He is presenting one of these stories for the first time in the exhibition.
What remains The Swiss Indonesian artist Miranda Kistler draws a parallel between memory and erosion. Just as the rocks along the Rhine between Switzerland and the Netherlands have been shaped by the river’s flow and human intervention, memories are also altered over time. A photo from her grandmother’s album is displayed on a piece of textile that hangs freely in the exhibition space. Her grandmother’s photo albums have suffered water damage from the constant flooding in the part of Java where she lives.
In The Sugarcoated Venture, brothers Tyler and Sebastian Koudijzer trace their Javanese Surinamese roots. In 1972, their grandparents Watinie and Iksan left their native Suriname to settle in the Netherlands. Their family history is closely intertwined with the system of indentured labour that took Javanese migrants to Suriname after the abolition of slavery. In 2023, the brothers returned with their grandparents, searching for the places and stories that have shaped their history. They documented this journey through photographs, the spoken word and archival materials. During the opening night, they will perform a short version of their theatre piece.
Lastly, the exhibition showcases the work of DJ and artistic researcher Sekan. For this, the space is transformed into an auditory experience that features a curated selection of music, bringing together old and new music from the Indonesian archipelago and the diaspora: from protest music from West Papua, rock from the Moluccan neighborhood, and Javanese-Surinamese funk. In this intimate listening experience, music becomes a form of heritage, resistance, and collective memory, bridging the gap between stories, memories, and worlds.
Public programme The public programme explores how the third generation can contribute to the conversation about how this shared past affects the present and the future. It has been developed together with Museum Sophiahof and various partners from the participating communities. The programme kicks off during Museum Night on 11 October with the festive opening of the exhibition.
From 18 September, Museum Sophiahof will host a special outdoor exhibition featuring works that Moluccan photographer Otto Tatipikalawan made in the 1980s and ’90s about Moluccan communities in the Netherlands, curated by Museum Maluku.
Publication At the end of November, Jap Sam Books will publish a book, designed by Eva van der Schans, that brings together the artists’ projects with a text by museum curator Iris Sikking and essays by Nienke Coers (guest researcher), Lara Nuberg (historian and writer) and Jeftha Pattikawa (researcher and DE&I advisor).
The public programme has been organised in partnership with Museum Sophiahof. The exhibition and public programme have been made possible by the Vfonds and Mondrian Fund.
Museum Panorama Mesdag presents Light, Air, Water – The Painters of The Hague : a visually rich and surprising exhibition that, from an art historical perspective, charts the development of The Hague painting over two centuries. From 19th-century masters like Andreas Schelfhout to contemporary artists like Sebastiaan Spit, all found and continue to find inspiration in the same phenomenon: the changing coastal light of The Hague.
Two centuries of light, air and water
Over sixty artworks from museum and private collections are presented in a unique context of light, air, and water. Classical masters such as Hendrik Willem Mesdag, Sientje Mesdag-van Houten, Wijnand Nuijen, Willem Roelofs, George Hendrik Breitner, and Willem Bastiaan Tholen are shown alongside modernists like Jan Mankes, Co Westerik, and Willem Hussem. While these artists drew inspiration from foreign forerunners like John Constable, Richard Bonington, and the Barbizon painters, contemporary artists like Marjolein Knottenbelt and Casper Faassen revisit the tradition of the Hague School.
Special attention is given to the influence of meteorologist Luke Howard, whose cloud classification provided artists with a new vocabulary for capturing light and air.
” Light, air, and water are the ingredients that compose clouds. It’s no coincidence that they form the leitmotif of this exhibition. From Schelfhout to Hussem and from Weissenbruch to Westerik, the connection with The Hague’s horizon has always been the most important source of inspiration for the painters of the royal capital. Looking into the clouds above the North Sea, you see more than a beautiful spectacle; it’s a centuries-old dialogue between sky, light, and the Dutch landscape. With this exhibition, we want to make that fleeting moment—so masterfully captured by The Hague’s painters—tangible for our visitors ,” says guest curator Werner van der Belt.
Out
The exhibition begins with Andreas Schelfhout, who, even before the French Barbizon painters, worked outdoors in the Scheveningen dunes. His cloud studies—influenced by English contemporaries and the meteorological insights of his time—marked the beginnings of a new artistic approach to landscape. From these early developments, the Hague School emerged, driven by figures like Mesdag, de Marissen, and Weissenbruch. Their paintings, characterized by a grand, atmospheric realism, emphasized light, air, and water.
From modernism to new light
From the interwar period well into the twentieth century, The Hague’s landscape continued to inspire artists. Artists like Jan Mankes, Willem Hussem, Rein Draijer, Co Westerik, Theo Bitter, and Nol Kroes explored new forms and meanings. Westerik depicted the sea as a sensory experience, Hussem abstracted the coastal landscape into pure form, and Bitter transformed the beach into a monumental backdrop.
Art of today – with light from the past
The final section of the exhibition focuses on contemporary artists. They paint, photograph, and create installations that re-examine and reimagine The Hague’s light, air, and water. Sebastiaan Spit explores the interplay of clouds and shadows above the sea, Marjolein Knottenbelt breathes new life into old paintings, and Cassandra van Veen literally dives into the sea to transform her experience into images.
Museum director Minke Schat: “ We bring the silver light of The Hague to life – from Schelfhout to the present – with Mesdag’s iconic Panorama as a magical pivot point in the exhibition .”
The exhibition is curated by guest curator Werner van den Belt and museum director Minke Schat, in collaboration with the Kunstmuseum Den Haag, the Hague Historical Museum, Hoogsteder & Hoogsteder, the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands, Museum De Fundatie, Museum Belvédère, and the Groninger Museum, among others.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a richly illustrated book by co-authors Werner van den Belt and Bob Hardus, in collaboration with publisher WBOOKS.
Mark Manders (1968) explores the quiet depths of human consciousness. The internationally acclaimed artist fixes thoughts and moments in sculptures, paintings and installations that hover between the tangible and the elusive. His oeuvre breathes a poetic tension: intimate and universal, concrete and mysterious.
For Voorlinden he brings together more than eighty works –both iconic and more recent pieces – which together form a layered journey through his world of thought. The solo exhibition Mindstudy is on display from 20 September 2025 to 18 January 2026.
A journey into the imagination
In Mindstudy Mark Manders invites you to follow him through the spaces of his thinking. At Voorlinden he constructs a living room, a bathroom, factories and studio spaces — and to do so, the museum’s interior is substantially reworked. He starts on the estate and inside the museum, he redirects the entrance into his exhibition. There unfolds a world of frozen thoughts and arrested moments. There is no chronological ordering: early work may look recent, while other pieces have the aura of an archaeological artefact. Subtle connections and echoes arise between the works, which link to and refer to one another. One example is the monumental installation Room With Three Dead Birds and Falling Dictionaries, in which painted dictionaries fall onto collages of newspapers that contain every English word, while — as the title reveals — three dead birds are hidden.
A first for Escher in Het Paleis: from 20 November, the contemporary work of the “British Escher” Anne Desmet will be on display in the Netherlands for the first time, alongside that of her great inspiration, M.C. Escher.
At a young age, Desmet became fascinated by themes such as transformation and architecture. In her room hung a poster of M.C. Escher’s Day and Night, in which black and white birds fly over a Dutch landscape and gradually transform into that landscape in the centre.
Years later, she learned etching, woodcutting, engraving, screen printing and lithography at the University of Oxford’s Ruskin School of Art. Winning the Lithography Prize from the Printmakers Council in London at the age of 23, followed by a Rome Scholarship, laid the foundation for her illustrious career.
Like Escher, she is amazed by the world around her, and both translate this inspiration into graphic work full of depth, light and illusion. Despite the differences in eras and styles, their ideas are surprisingly similar.
Ready for a new journey through time? Marty McFly and Doc Brown return to the big screen! Director Robert Zemeckis’ iconic film returns to various Pathé theaters on November 13. The classic film is being released for the first time in IMAX and 4DX, creating a unique cinematic experience that merges past, present, and future.
Forty years after its original release, the magical time-travel adventure gets a modern upgrade. A unique opportunity for fans and film enthusiasts to experience this masterpiece with the best picture and sound in IMAX, as well as moving seats and the special effects that make 4DX a truly unique cinematic experience.
Pre-sale began on the legendary date of October 21st , better known as Back to the Future Day: the date Marty and Doc arrive in the future in the second film (October 21, 2015).
Back to the Future will be shown for a limited time starting November 13, 2025, in select Pathé IMAX and 4DX theaters in the Netherlands.
Crossing Border is one of the oldest and most innovative music and literature festivals in Europe, and the leading international festival of its kind in The Netherlands. Since 1992, we have been welcoming the biggest names in music and literature, as well as showcasing new and exciting talent from The Netherlands and beyond.
The 2025 festival program features over 120 international writers and musicians.
Crossing Border is organized by Stichting Other World Productions, a non-profit organization which aims to promote literature and reading through compelling live events in which audiences can interact with writers from all over the world.
