Mirelle van Tulder Mirelle van Tulder
Mirelle van Tulder holds an MA in Fine Art and Design from Werkplaats Typografie (2021-2023) in Arnhem. She was a Research Associate at the Research Center for Material Culture, Wereldmuseum (2021-2023). Mirelle has worked as an image researcher for MacGuffin Magazine from 2019-2023.
Her practice delves into the colonial archive, seeing its complexity not only as an incredibly vast collection of objects and documents, but also understanding its position concerning personal history. She combines the use of the archived material and its historical position, determined by displacement, with its poetic performativity as a prompt to point to the historical record of the many colonised areas in the Global South. As Mirelle’s research expands and evolves, her work stands as a testament to her commitment to uncovering hidden histories and fostering dialogue around the power structures that shape graphic design, art history and society as a whole.
In 2022, she founded the magazine and publishing house Roots to Fruits, that explores the intersections between music, archives, and resistance. Roots to Fruits has been included in Printed Matter’s New York Art Book Fair (2022), Offprint London (2023), and the Melbourne Art Book Fair (2023).
In 2023 Mirelle van Tulder became the new Atelier KITLV-Framer Framed Artist in Residence. Artists in residence work on urgent topics at the intersection of art and culture, academic research, and scholarship in the field of Southeast Asian and/or Caribbean Studies, and in relation to (post)colonial theory and discourse. As part of her residency, her work has been on shown as part of the exhibition Sensible Past: Of Distances and the Fabrication of the Frame (2024) at Gedung Balai Pemuda in Surabaya, Indonesia, and Shapeshifters: On Wounds, Wonders and Transformations (2025) at Framer Framed, Amsterdam. The exhibition Shapeshifters was developed in the framework of the NWO research project Pressing Matter: Ownership, Value and the Question of Colonial Heritage in Museums, in which Framer Framed is a societal partner.
After Catalogue of Stolen Objects (2025), the publication Emptying the Shelves (2025) is the second book published as a result of the artistic research project that Mirelle van Tulder conducted during the Atelier KITLV-Framer Framed Artist in Residency Program. The publication talks about the museological practices of the Dutch National Museum of World Cultures, with a focus on Amsterdam (and some other Dutch museums like the Rijksmuseum). It shows how modes of displaying of cultural objects throughout the 19th century has shifted from full cabinets to a modernistic displays of almost ‘empty’ museum putting only 3% of their collection on display (and 97% stored in a depot shelves).
Exhibitions
Exhibition: Shapeshifters
A group exhibition examining how colonialism has shaped museums, archives and other institutions of knowledge
Exhibition: Sensible Past in Surabaya – Of Distances and the Fabrication of the Frame
Group exhibition in Surabaya, Indonesia with Atelier KITLV-Framer Framed artists-in-residence
Agenda
Opening: Shapeshifters
Group exhibition that examines how colonialism has shaped the ways museums, archives and other institutions of knowledge are perceived and understood
Magazine
Caribbean / The living archive / Colonial history / Open Call / Residencies / Southeast Asia /
Colonial history / Indonesia / Residencies / Southeast Asia /
Framer Framed in Surabaya – Sensible Past: Of Distances and the Fabrication of the Frame
Colonial history / The living archive / Residencies /
Announcement: Atelier KITLV-Framer Framed Artist Residency
Art and Activism / Action Research / Community & Learning / Residencies /