Memento

In 2025 Huis Marseille, Museum for Photography will be 25 years old. To celebrate this, from 28 June till 12 October 2025 the museum will hold the exhibition Memento. Photography, interrupted, in both of its 17th-century buildings on the Keizersgracht in Amsterdam.

Displaying the works in both an unconventional and monumental way, Huis Marseille is presenting over a hundred contemporary photographic highlights from its rich collection, offering insight into a quarter-century of collection policy. The exhibition shows that the collection has not only closely reflected developments in photography and visual culture, but also developments in society itself, particularly over the last five years.

A rich collection
Over the last two and a half decades Huis Marseille, Amsterdam’s first photography museum, has acquired over eight hundred works of contemporary photography. This rich collection includes work by numerous internationally prominent photographers, such as Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky, Andres Serrano, Deana Lawson, Viviane Sassen, and Jean-Luc Mylayne, but it also gives generous space to less familiar names. Recent acquisitions, for instance, include photographs by Jamie Hawkesworth, Nhu Xuan Hua, and Tyler Mitchell – work created at the intersection of fashion and art. The Huis Marseille collection is of an exceptionally high quality; to see other works of this standard by Deana Lawson, Joanna Piotrowska, or Zanele Muholi, for instance, you would have to travel abroad.

Every photograph is a memento
In what ways has the Huis Marseille collection developed over the course of its 25-year existence? Memento answers this question. Every photograph is itself a memento; that is to say, it is bound to a particular moment in time. But the works in the collection can also be seen as mementos in the history of the museum itself. Each piece either formed part of an exhibition, or inspired one. Each was associated with a long-term working relationship with an artist or was acquired under a specific directorate. Above all the collection reflects the important changes that have taken place in society and art practice in particular, which have gathered momentum ever since the outbreak of the Covid pandemic in 2020.

Unconventional presentation
Memento is by no means a chronological exhibition explaining how the collection was formed. Instead the photographs are presented in a way that is as monumental as it is unconventional. A collection piece would normally only be found in one of two places: the depot or the exhibition gallery. For Memento these two locations were combined: the presentation in the galleries mimics the way paintings are stored on racks in a depot. The Depot of the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen lent its Lina Bo Bardi ‘glass easels’ to Huis Marseille, and these display the works as objects in the space.

The exhibition designer Philip Lüschen created a live/animation film based on the depot. A unique ‘zine’ – a sort of miniature catalogue – was created for seven of the galleries, and each one invited an author to contribute a text or a poem.