Collection displays often promise clarity. They tend to organize artworks between smooth sequences and pretentious narratives, offering visitors a legible path through history, style, and institutional achievement. Within this format, time becomes disciplinary, differences are carefully separated, and the museum presents itself as a place where complexity can be held without friction.
What follows from this is a boringly familiar economy of attention. Works are arranged to be easily consumed, narratives are stabilized in advance, and even gestures toward diversity can become part of a reassuring surface. In such settings, inclusion risks becoming a matter of visibility alone, while the authority that determines visibility remains largely intact.
The approach taken here moves differently. It treats the collection not as a neutral archive but as something shaped by labor, maintenance, inheritance, and ongoing negotiation. Rather than smoothing over these conditions, it allows them to remain present in the ways works are grouped and encountered. The result is less of a single story than a set of relations that do not resolve into a single line of reading.
This shift is closely tied to a redistribution of authorship. Curatorial decisions are made transparently and horizontally in dialogue with artists, researchers, museum staff, and local participants whose structuring contributions avoid illustrative automatisms. Each of the temporal frameworks that organizes the exhibition emerges from a specific practice, whether grounded in drawing, storytelling, bodily movement, or cosmological mapping. These are working methods that shape how the collection is activated beyond thematic overlays.
Attention is also given to what is usually kept outside the frame of exhibition-making, for instance objects the workers from the museum relate to when thinking of the collection they encounter every day. Forms of care, administrative decision-making, and the often invisible work of maintaining a collection are brought into proximity with the display itself. In this sense, the museum is a site where different kinds of labor and knowledge intersect.
After a busy and joyful opening of the new collection, I interviewed Yolande Zola Zoli van der Heide, following the traces of how this approach was stewarded from within the institution, and how it continues to reshape the ways a collection can be inhabited, narrated, and understood.
Collection as Cosmos (2026), curated by Yolande Zola Zoli van der Heide, Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven. Foto: Peter Cox © Van Abbemuseum 2026
A Museum Learns to Let Go
MI: You have been working at the Van Abbemuseum for several years now. It feels like a period of intense transformation for the institution.
YH: It has really been a collective effort. This is my sixth year here, I started in January 2020.
COVID-19 revealed many violent structural inadequacies, but it was also a kind of portal in that it slowed everything down for me including my work at the museum. Beginning my work at that moment meant entering an institution that suddenly had to become visible to itself. Working remotely, behind screens, the museum’s internal rhythms became more legible. You could see the machinery more clearly—the assumptions, the tempo, the invisible procedures that usually remain in the background.
At the same time, there was a shift across museums globally. Suddenly, collections were not secondary to blockbuster exhibitions or international loans. They became the primary material. Institutions were forced to work with what was already there.
In 2022, I worked on “A Lasting Truth Is Change”, an exhibition with the Van Abbemuseum collection that explored how transformation might be understood inside a heritage institution. It drew on Octavia Butler’s Parable novels as a conceptual grounding—stories in which change is not exceptional. That exhibition became a way of thinking through the collection as something unstable, something that is always already in motion.
After that, Charles Esche invited me to develop the next collection display, following “Dwarsverbanden (Delinking/Relinking)”. That invitation eventually became “Collection as Cosmos”.
MI: The pandemic made visible how dependent museums are on proximity, on relationships with neighbours, communities, and forms of labor that are often invisible. This is also connected to Octavia Butler’s thinking. How did the idea of “Collection as Cosmos” emerge within her constellations? Was it shaped by thinking about those invisible forms of labor that sustain the museum, or did it come more from speculative thinking, as in science fiction, cosmology?
YH: It is all of that, really. During the research phase, I was interested in expanding the curatorial process beyond the curatorial team (I worked closely with Assistant Curator Abril Cisneros Ramírez, Project Leader Nikita Hurkmans, and Head of Collection Steven ten Thije). This is already at stake when you work with a collection display because the project touches every facet of a museum and requires every department. We worked closely with colleagues from the collection department, not only as custodians of objects but as co-researchers. That already shifted the starting question.
Building on the central question that, say, in “A Lasting Truth is Change”, namely: how does change figure in a heritage institution, for “Collection as Cosmos” we began asking something more difficult: how does death operate in a heritage institution? What does it mean for a museum that is structurally built on accumulation, preservation, and continuity to think seriously about endings?
That question became the basis for what we later called Regenerative Time.
We worked with the artist and death researcher G, who invited us into a different register of thinking through grief. One of the key references was We the Heartbroken by Gargi Bhattacharyya. The book was read as a group by the members of the collection team as a way of approaching mourning not as metaphor, but as practice.
Of course, artworks are not people. But museums are still institutions that hold, care for, and sometimes remove things from circulation. The question became: what kinds of ethical frameworks exist for letting go?
Through workshops and discussions with G and the collection team, we began to approach deaccessioning not only as an administrative procedure, but as a form of institutional lifecycle thinking—an attempt to acknowledge that accumulation cannot be infinite.
One of the unexpected starting points came from within the collection itself: a 17th-century painting by Italian baroque painter Guercino depicting Andromeda. It had long been an anomaly in a museum primarily focused on modern and contemporary art—rarely shown, almost suspended in institutional time.
Rather than treating it as an outlier, it became a case through which to think about endings. Together with colleagues in the collection department, we began to consider whether this work might be deaccessioned. We are currently in conversation with Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen about a possible transfer, should that process go through. If it does, it would mark the first formal deaccession in the museum’s history.
MI: So in a sense, the “heart” of the process came from those who care for the collection on a daily basis, within the institution itself?
YH: Yes, but not as a single origin point. What mattered was that the distinction between front of house and back of house started to blur. The people who care for objects daily (the collection team) are often invisible in the public imagination of a museum. Their work is maintenance, care, repair, storage, and cleaning. But without that labor, nothing holds.
One of the aims of “Collection as Cosmos” was to bring those layers closer together: to align the institution’s public language with its internal practices. Not in a way that simplifies them, but in a way that makes their interdependence visible.
The question, ultimately, was how to make a museum that is closer to living up to what it says it is.
Collection as Cosmos (2026), curated by Yolande Zola Zoli van der Heide, Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven. Foto: Peter Cox © Van Abbemuseum 2026
Constellations Instead of Timelines
MI: Do you feel that the gap you described—between institutional language and institutional practice—has been closed?
YH: No. And I don’t think it ever closes. It is something you work with, not something you resolve.
The Van Abbemuseum is nearly ninety years old. It has gone through many shifts—political, curatorial, economic, and institutional changes. But the same questions could be asked of almost any modern art museum.
MI: That brings me to the locality. People tend to recognise a museum through what is visible and familiar to them. But much of the collection—like Guercino’s Andromeda—does not belong to that immediate field of recognition. It sits outside the expected image of a modern and contemporary art museum.
YH: Yes, exactly. And that expectation is precisely what the exhibition tries to unsettle.
Another of its key frameworks is Unchronological Time, developed with the Johannesburg working group of Another Roadmap Africa Cluster (ARAC). In a workshop with mediation and education colleagues, ARAC members Lineo Segoete and David Andrew introduced us to their “unchronological timeline” methodological tool: a way of writing personal histories into dominant historical narratives. We went on to develop a Van Abbe edition of the unchronological timeline tool, which is applied in “Collection as Cosmos”.
In very simple terms, the question at the center is: if history is usually told as a straight line, how do you interrupt that line with lived experience?
That became the basis for the 90 Narrators project. We are halfway in the process of inviting ninety neighbors from Eindhoven and the wider Brabant region to contribute a small domestic object—something that fits in the palm of a hand. Each object is placed in direct relation to a work from the collection.
The object acts as a hinge. It allows an artwork to be read not only through art history, but through memory, proximity, and everyday life. Alongside the museum’s interpretation, you encounter a second narrative—fragile, personal, sometimes unexpected.
It is not about replacing one narrative with another. It is about placing them next to each other to provide an additional way of approaching and seeing an artwork.
MI: I feel invited to remember beyond linearity.
YH: Exactly! The exhibition purposefully veers away from linear arrangement towards how we experience time in the day-to-day, and that is many times simultaneously in a single moment.
Each gallery brings together works from different periods that are not arranged chronologically but relationally. You might move from a seventeenth-century painting to a work from the 1960s to a contemporary installation, and the point is to make many relations and conversations across time.
This disturbance of the modernist timeline is something you feel spatially as well. The design by Matilde Cassani Studio reinforces that experience. The skirting motif that runs through the galleries behaves like a decorative petticoat hung across the walls of white cube. It interrupts the neutrality that the white cube is supposed to guarantee. The first skirting pattern that you encounter in the Andromeda gallery, for instance, is by Chris Lebeau, the Dutch Art Nouveau and Art Deco designer, active in the early 20th century, who was influenced by the English textile designer, William Morris, from the century before. I was convinced to work with Matilde because of the pre-modern references she proposed as a way of contending with modernity.
MI: That collapse of time also becomes material at certain moments. I’m thinking of the textile elements that appear alongside works like Franz Erhard Walther’s. There is a sense of friction between materials, histories, and conceptual registers. And of course, what we see is only a fraction of the collection.
YH: Yes, exactly. We are showing a very small percentage of the collection. Around 280 works in total, out of around 3,800.
Part of the intention was also to bring works back into visibility that have not been shown for a long time. , is one example. Karel Appel’s Between Banner and Flag (1987) and Cristina Iglesias, Untitled (Bamboo Sticks) (1994) in the sculptural arrangements in the “forest” are another.
But more importantly, we didn’t want the space to behave like a sequence of rooms divided by walls. In fact, there are almost no walls in the exhibition spatial design. The white cube remains as a baseline condition, but instead of constructing within it, we worked through ornamentation.
That decision connects directly to the word cosmos itself. Cosmos refers both to order and to ornament, to structure and to decoration. The exhibition holds those two meanings in tension. We are literally decorating the order of the museum house and arranging artwork in multi-temporal star clusters.
Modernist display systems tend to privilege order, clarity, and separation. What we tried to introduce is another logic—one where relation, proximity, and interference matter as much as categorization.
MI: So cosmos here is not just a metaphor, but a method of relation.
YH: It is relationality as structure.
Each major gallery can be read as a kind of miniature collection display. Works from different curatorial and directorial periods sit together, often without obvious narrative connection. Visitors may not know this, but they sense it: temporal shifts happen constantly.
You might encounter a 17th-century painting next to a postwar modernist work and then a contemporary intervention. You are not guided through time, you move through it.
One reference that informed this thinking comes from Noleca Radaway, who in her podcast Raising Rebels describes care across a lifetime as being “twice a child and once an adult.” We need care at the beginning and end of life, while autonomy is often overemphasised in the middle.
We adapted this idea as a way of thinking about institutional time. Each director arrives with a set of priorities, shapes a moment, and leaves a trace. Thinking through those cycles allowed us to read the collection not as a single narrative, but as overlapping phases of care, transition, and transformation. This is how we selected artworks from every director's tenure and started to reflect on Defne Ayas’s period when she arrived last year.
From that, different constellations emerged, temporary alignments of works across time. Not fixed histories, but shifting relations. Small cosmologies within the larger museum.
Collection as Cosmos (2026), curated by Yolande Zola Zoli van der Heide, Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven. Foto: Peter Cox © Van Abbemuseum 2026
Time as a Commons
MI: Listening to you speak about cosmologies and time, it becomes clear that these concepts have historically reflected systems of power. Cosmologies often determine who belongs within a world and who remains outside it. Museums have traditionally done something similar through their collections, exhibitions, and leadership structures.
What strikes me about “Collection as Cosmos” is that this hierarchy is displaced. Instead of being organized around directors or institutional authority, the exhibition is structured through four approaches to time developed with G, Another Roadmap Africa Cluster, Ima-Abasi Okon, and Nolan Oswald Dennis.
How did these collaborations take shape? And how were these temporalities authored? Although the exhibition is clearly collective, each of these approaches—Regenerative Time, Unchronological Time, Public Time, and Cosmic Times—retains a distinct authorship and perspective.
YH: Several orders or methodologies are stacked on one another in the exhibition. Alongside the “twice a child, once a man” is the collaboration with the artist interlocutor, each with a time principle. Each temporal principle is rooted in a specific artwork, practice, or tool. They are not abstract curatorial categories that we imposed onto the collection. They emerged through dialogue with artists and collaborators whose work was already engaging these questions. We often piggybacked off the acquisitions process to have these conversations with artists, that is, as their work entered the Van Abbemuseum collection.
Take Regenerative Time, developed with G. At its center are several sculptural works that sit within the gallery containing Franz Erhard Walther’s costume pieces. One of the sculptures is positioned on a washing machine, suggesting a domestic setting for the grief sculpture. These works entered the collection and became a focal point for thinking about lifecycles, grief, and transformation.
What interests me about G’s practice is the way it attempts to give form to experiences that are difficult to articulate through language, particularly grief. Much of her work asks how mourning might be brought into everyday life rather than being treated as something exceptional or distant.
A daily drawing practice is central to this. Through drawing, G explores how grief can be shaped, held, and lived with. During the exhibition’s opening program, this practice also informed workshops for families and children, where drawing and coloring became ways of approaching difficult emotions collectively.
Those drawings are not separate from the sculptures; they are the foundation from which the sculptures emerge. Together, they offer a way of thinking about grief not as a singular event but as an ongoing process.
MI: And what about Unchronological Time?
YH: The unchronological timeline is actually an existing methodology developed by Another Roadmap Africa Cluster. It is a tool that allows people to position their personal histories alongside official narratives.
For “Collection as Cosmos”, this methodology was adapted through the 90 Narrators project. The personal objects contributed by participants are housed within what we call the Grotto, and they appear throughout the exhibition. These objects function as points of connection between individual memories and the museum’s collection.
The project asks how personal histories might coexist with institutional histories rather than being subordinated to them.
MI: Public Time seems to operate completely differently again.
YH: Yes. With Ima-Abasi Okon, I drew on the solo exhibition that we worked on together in 2025, which centralizes her running practice.
The blue inflatable arches that embellish and mark the start and end of the sculpture forest may be familiar to marathon participants. They are the ones found at the start and finish lines of races. In Ima-Abasi’s solo exhibition, visitors would walk through these inflatable archways and retrofitted start and stop points throughout the galleries, reflected on a clock, evoking a sense of time-travelling, because, unlike in a race where a "best time is measured," Ima-Abasi resets a fractured one. Time didn’t accrue but reset with each start and stop line encountered.
What I have learned from her work is that time does not have to be understood solely through productivity, speed, or accumulation. Running is not only about racing. It also involves pacing, resting, pausing, and recovery.
That thinking then informed the exhibition far beyond the artworks themselves. It shaped how we approached the museum as a physical environment.
Visitors may notice chairs, seating areas, and cushions throughout the building. Transitional spaces between galleries are treated as meaningful spaces in their own right rather than simply as passages from one artwork to another. These mark the Public Time research thread. Rest and hangout become part of the exhibition experience.
In that sense, Public Time is not confined to a single room. It influences how the entire exhibition is inhabited.
MI: And finally, Cosmic Times.
YH: Cosmic Times is developed through Nolan Oswald Dennis’s Black Liberation Zodiac (Khunuseti), which occupies the uppermost floor of the exhibition.
The project proposes an alternative mapping of the night sky. Rather than reproducing dominant Eurocentric constellations, Nolan reimagines celestial knowledge through perspectives and mythologies connected to the African continent and the Global South.
The work is part of a much larger ongoing project, but the version in our collection became a crucial point of departure for the exhibition.
Khunuseti is the Namaqua word for the Pleiades, which are highlighted in Nolan’s work on display. From Nolan, we learned that the Pleiades are associated in different parts of the world with agricultural cycles. Their appearance and disappearance mark moments for sowing and harvesting.
In other words, people look to the sky to understand what needs to happen on the ground beneath their feet. Night sky reading reveals your location on Earth.
That principle informed the Cosmic Times research thread in the exhibition found in the Cosmic Landscape room. There, landscapes from different periods are brought together in a salon-style display. Visitors can read them individually, but they can also encounter them as part of a larger constellation.
Across all four temporalities, the question was the same: what do these artworks invite us to do? And how might those invitations reshape the way we understand the collection?
MI: Hearing you describe it in these terms makes the exhibition remarkably tangible. It also clarifies how “Collection as Cosmos” extends beyond the collection galleries and enters into dialogue with the museum’s ground floor, which has been reimagined as a space for participation and collaboration.
Perhaps, as a final thought, could you say something about that relationship?
YH: For me, one of the works that most clearly connects the upper floors to the ground floor is Haegue Yang’s Sonic Celestial Rope – Dodecagon Infinite Curl in Red Staccato. The suspended structure of bells runs vertically at the heart of the building and links different parts of the museum together, ultimately connecting the top part of the building with the bottom. This work was commissioned for this tower space, and it draws from the Korean folklore of Sister Sun and Brother Moon. Koreans tell the story of siblings who transform into celestial bodies by climbing a tree and then a metal chain descending from the heavens to escape a tiger that is chasing them. Although visitors encounter it throughout the collection display, it is activated daily by museum hosts at noon (the highest point of the sun) each day to mark Eindhoven time as a way of reminding us where we are, and perhaps the work to be done directly beneath our feet. The Sonic Celestial Rope is also the work that connects “Collection as Cosmos” to Dommelplein on the ground floor.
The ground floor itself is also designed by Matilde Cassani Studio with graphics by Studio Pupilla and conceived as a civic space by Defne Ayas. We wanted to create places where people could spend time without feeling that they needed to consume culture in a prescribed way.
There are areas for children to play and rearrange furniture. There is a dedicated children’s corner. There is a quiet room for reflection, meditation, and prayer. There are spaces where families can read together, rest or simply spend time.
Alongside these facilities, there are smaller presentations and collaborations with artists, designers and local partners, namely: It also hosts solo presentations by Ad Minoliti, Sarkis, john gerrard, Ayoung Kim, Geo Design department of Design Academy Eindhoven, Studio Woensel-West, with neuro-inclusive tools designed by ADEZIV. The emphasis is not only on viewing art but on inhabiting the museum differently.
I am still trying to understand what that means in practice because it is much easier to talk about than to realise. Creating genuine spaces for gathering and lingering is actually quite difficult within a museum.
But that is what Dommelplein attempts to do. It creates the conditions for spending time together. And from there, you can move into “Collection as Cosmos”.
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- Footnotes
Collection as Cosmos, Van Abbemuseum. Photo Nick Bookelaar
