Thursday, June 5, 2025, 6 – 7:30 pm
Screening of The Museum Visits a Therapist, 2021
by Sameer Farooq and Mirham Linschooten with a post-screening conversation between Farooq and Jenifer Papararo
The Rectangle gallery
What if a museum went to therapy? What might it confess? What would it try to forget? These questions animate The Museum Visits a Therapist, a 19-minute video which is the culmination of a four-year engagement with Amsterdam’s Tropenmuseum by artists Mirjam Linschooten and Sameer Farooq. With over 150,000 objects in its ethnographic collection, many acquired through colonization, the museum becomes both subject and setting for this exquisitely shot, deeply affecting video.
Structured as a fictional therapy session, the video follows the restoration of a group of bisj poles from the Asmat people of New Guinea collected during Dutch military campaigns in the fifties and sixties. As conservators quietly clean and care for these ceremonial objects, various journal entries and testimonies from Dutch soldiers and missionaries are read aloud as well as letters between one of the museum’s primary mid-twentieth-century collectors and an early Tropenmuseum director. The narrative drifts between personal memory and institutional record, between the sensory rhythms of preservation and the visual language of trauma treatment, referencing EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) therapy through both flashbacks and audio cues.
Following the screening, Director/Curator Jenifer Papararo will be in conversation with artist Sameer Farooq to discuss how the work came to be, what it reveals about the emotional life of institutions, and how we might imagine more accountable and humane practices of collection and display.
This screening and conversation is presented in relation to Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn’s groundbreaking and moving exhibition When Water Embraces Empty Space, currently on view at The Goldfarb Gallery. The Museum Visits a Therapist resonates strongly with Nguyen’s exhibition, considering what repair might actually look like within institutional settings. Both hold mirrors to the museum’s inner workings—its silences, compulsions, and attempts at self-repair—while asking broader questions about restitution, care, and the futures of cultural stewardship.
Sameer Farooq and Mirjam Linschooten, The Museum Visits a Therapist, 2021. Video still. Courtesy the artists.
Mirjam Linschooten is a Dutch visual artist and researcher. She completed an MA at the Dutch Art Institute and a BFA at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy. Linschooten’s work has been exhibited at institutions nationally and internationally, including Cemeti, Yogyakarta; De Appel, Amsterdam; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Het Wilde Weten, Rotterdam; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Vicki Myhren Gallery, Denver; the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, Trankat, Tétouan; Artellewa, Cairo; and Sanat Limanı, Istanbul.
Sameer Farooq is a Canadian visual artist of Pakistani and Ugandan Indian descent. He holds an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and a BFA from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. Farooq has held recent exhibitions at institutions around the world including the Jaou Photography Biennale, Tunis; Toronto Biennial of Art; Le 19, crac, Montbéliard; Venice Architecture Biennale; Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, Leiden; Materia Abierta, Mexico City; Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff; and the Fonderie Darling, Montreal. Reviews dedicated to his work have appeared in Art Forum, Canadian Art, BBC Culture, Hyperallergic, and other media.
This screening and conversation is presented in relation to Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn’s groundbreaking and moving exhibition When Water Embraces Empty Space, currently on view at The Goldfarb Gallery. The Museum Visits a Therapist resonates strongly with Nguyen’s exhibition, considering what repair might actually look like within institutional settings. Both hold mirrors to the museum’s inner workings—its silences, compulsions, and attempts at self-repair—while asking broader questions about restitution, care, and the futures of cultural stewardship.
For more information on Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn’s solo exhibition When Water Embraces Empty Space, please see here. This is the first presentation of Nguyễn’s work in Canada.
