Bert Sliggers Bert Sliggers
Bert C. Sliggers (1948) is a curator at the Teylers Museum (Haarlem, Netherlands). His main field of interest is the history of science and the practice of collecting.
Sliggers curated numerous exhibitions on the history and study of “man as an object”, such as De Tentoongestelde Mens (The Exhibited Man), Het Verdwenen Museum (The Lost Museum), >Herkomst: Boudewijn Büch (Origin: Boudewijn Büch), De Versierde Mens (The Decorated Man), Vulkanen (Volcanoes), De Exotische Mens (The Exotic Man) and Noachs Ark, op weg naar Darwin. (Noah’s Ark, the way to Darwin).
Last year The Exotic man, Foreign Cultures as Entertainment (2009) attracted a lot of attention. The exhibition shows how “exotic people” were brought to Europe and displayed in theatres, fairs, circuses and colonial exhibitions, during the end of the 19th century. Those persons were put on display to represent overseas wealth, be living illustrations of the “missing link”, or displayed for mere entertainment purposes. Artists from those regions where such displays were staged, were invited by Sliggers to react on this practice of exhibiting humans as objects.
Recently, Bert Sliggers was invited by the Dutch broadcasting organization VPRO to join the project Beagle: On the future of species, a reenactment Darwin’s historical voyage.
