Monster (van Hollandabad)

In Collaboration with Gelare Khoshgozaran

Description: Monster (van Hollandabad) (English title: Sample (from Hollandabad)) traces the unsettling journey of a stone sarcophagus shipped in 1880 from the Persian Gulf port of Bushehr to the Netherlands, along with alleged human remains that traveled the same routes—remains later claimed by Dutch consul Richard Keun as having been found on the grounds of his house, “Hollandabad.” Through archival excavation, staged vignettes, and original poetry, the film unravels the layered fictions that anchored such acts of colonial possession.

Moving between centuries and sensibilities, the work follows the entangled lives of Dutch diplomat A.P.H. Hotz, American heiress and collector Josephine Powell, and the renowned Dutch Orientalist C. Snouck Hurgronje. Their writings, photographs, and collections guide the viewer through the ideological machinery that turned West Asian objects into European “discoveries,” now dispersed across institutions such as the Wereldmuseum Rotterdam and the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam.

Shot inside museum depots and storage rooms across the Netherlands, the film meditates on the museum as both a vault of knowledge and a chamber of colonial forgetting. Monster (van Hollandabad) invites its viewers to confront the afterlives of extraction and to reckon with the fragile, contested conditions under which cultural memory is curated, obscured, and reclaimed.

Image Description: Film stills, Monster (van Hollandabad), 16mm film transferred to video, sound, color, 29 minutes, 2025.