Pim Westerkamp
Curator Culture and History of Southeast Asia
Phone: +31 (0)20 5688443
Email: p.westerkamp@kit.nl
Pim Westerkamp joined the Tropenmuseum team in 2005. He has been trained as a cultural anthropologist and a dramaturgist. Before the Tropenmuseum he worked for 14 years as a curator for Indonesian history and material cultures in Museum Nusantara in Delft, where he restyled the museum. He established new connections between the historical collections and contemporary Dutch audiences. Mr. Westerkamp specializes in different aspects of Indonesia, related to culture, religion and history.
He has a profound experience in museum and collection management and in conceptualizing and realization of exhibitions. He is involved in debates on ethical issues such as illegal trade and the collections of human remains in ethnographic museums. He has published on Indonesian jewellery, Borneo beadwork, collection and colonial history. Mr. Westerkamp focuses in the Tropenmuseum on contemporary history and material culture of South East Asia and on international institutional development of museums, especially in Indonesia. He is member of several national cultural committees and boards.
Background information / expertise
Pim Westerkamp (1958) studied Indonesian Languages and Cultures at Leiden University. After obtaining his Bachelor's exam, he moved to Amsterdam to study Theatre Studies. In 1987 he graduated with his comparative research of Javanese dancing masks.
In 1991 he began his museum career in Museum Nusantara in Delft, at which he was curator of Indonesia. In 2001 he graduated yet again as an anthropologist with research into the daily lives of young Muslim people in Yogyakarta, Central Java.
He has been curator of the Culture and History of Southeast Asia in the Tropenmuseum since 2005. His work field covers a number of areas, such as contemporary material and immaterial heritage, colonial and modern history, the history of collection and exhibition in the Tropenmuseum and ethical issues relating to museums.
In this respect he is interested in the relationships between North and South and what this says about contemporary relationships. Owing to his extremely lengthy experience in the field of museology, he has considerable knowledge of the material culture of Indonesia in particular, but also its neighbouring countries.
For many years Westerkamp was chairman of the Cultures section of the Nederlandse Museum Vereniging (Netherlands Museum Association). He is now a member of the Ethical Board of the Stichting Volkenkundige Musea Nederland (Netherlands Ethnographic Museums Foundation) and is a member of the review committee Erfgoed van de Oorlog (Heritage of the War) of the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport. In 2008 he joined the board of the KITLV/Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean studies in Leiden for a term of four years.
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