Unfinished Past: Return, Keep, or…?

How can museum exhibitions enable visitors to critically engage with the complex histories of colonial collections and reflect on their potential (re)distribution?The Wereldmuseum Amsterdam's Unfinished Pasts: Return, Keep, or? brings this question into curatorial focus. 1 Moving beyond a binary of retention and restitution, the exhibition highlights conflicting claims, ongoing debates, and diverging values mobilized by different stakeholders in relation to colonial collections.This review assesses how its interpretive design both deepens and complicates the viewing experience.Unfinished Pasts opens with two showcases in which objects are organized by type and cultural-geographical region, recalling the Museum's origins as an ethnographic institution that bolstered colonial propaganda (Figure 1). 2 Visitors then enter the exhibition's main gallery, where 200 historical pieces are grouped into seven themes: 'It Was the Law at the Time?', 'Colonial Trade', 'Colonial Collecting', 'Scientific Collections', 'Missionary Collections', 'Is a Gift Just a Gift?', and 'Restitution'.The exhibition also features a selection of works by contemporary artists (Figures 234).Visitors can navigate these subjects in any order, engaging with questions of legitimate ownership, the impact of colonial expansion on European academic disciplines such as anthropology, the politics underlying gift-giving and missionary collecting, and recent developments in Dutch restitution policy and practice.