Ali Byers

Ali Byers is an emerging art historian based out of Montreal, QC at Concordia University. She is currently conducting research for her master’s thesis on the use of cartography in contemporary art. Her work centres on interdisciplinary histories, specifically those that blend art history and human geography. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Human Geography from the University of British Columbia.

Geographies of Care:
Beatrice Glow’s Rhunhattan, intimacies, and olfactory art

In a window-lit room overlooking the Hudson River, lush greenery surrounds two glass-topped tables upon which sits a red and white painted tea set. Under the glass are intricate stylized black and white maps of islands. The scent of nutmeg fills the air. This is how Beatrice Glow’s Rhunattan greets the public at Wave Hill Public Garden and Cultural Centre in the Bronx, New York. Rhunhattan: A Tale of Two Islands is a community-centred project that demonstrates the intimacies between the Banda Islands in Indonesia, the Netherlands, and the island of Manhattan in New York. The project centres on the 17^th century treaty in which the Dutch ceded colonial control of Manhattan to the English in exchange for sole colonial control of the Banda islands in Indonesia, specifically Rhun, which at the time was the world’s foremost producer of nutmeg. Taking the form of a collaborative project, virtual reality, videos, hand drawn maps, and an installation, Glow decentres visuality in her practice by upholding collaboration and engaging in multi-sensorial storytelling using scent, allowing her to illuminate intimate colonial histories concealed by visual representation. As Rhunhattan: A Tale of Two Islands is first and foremost a community-centered project, therefore its exhibition is but one of the many ways in which this project functions. It can take the form of inter-community exchange, video work, and installation. When exhibited as an installation, Rhunhattan articulates a multi-sensorial technique using maps of both islands, scented ceramics, videos, and virtual reality. Through an exploration of intimacies as theorized by Lisa Lowe and a close reading of the installation in relation to , I argue that Glow’s work animates intimate colonial histories in a multi-sensorial fashion. I begin by discussing the project at large, before turning to the work as installed at the Wave Hill Public Garden and Cultural Centre in 2015, and provide a brief discussion of olfaction in art.

According to historian Lisa Lowe, “the practice of reading across archives unsettles the distinctly bounded objects, methods, and temporal frameworks canonized by a national history.”^[1] In Intimacies of the Four Continents, she argues that the seemingly distinct histories of, for example, the Transatlantic slave trade and rise of liberalism in Europe are deeply connected, indeed intimate partners in history. This framework allows for an expansive view of history and for new connections to become clear, encouraging collaboration and communication. Beatrice Glow’s Rhunhattan can be seen as working across disciplines and expanding on the gaps in the archive since the work bridges the ostensibly disparate yet inherently linked colonial histories of the Banda Islands in Indonesia and the island of Manhattan in the United States. To achieve this, Glow begins with the 1667 Treaty of Breda, in which the English and the Dutch settled their colonial wars and the English gained control of New Amsterdam (today’s New York City). The Dutch also maintained their monopoly of the spice trade. ^[2] The Dutch occupied the Banda islands in Indonesia beginning in 1599, profiting off of the trade of its spices since the early 17^th century.^[3] In other words, the two colonial powers traded one island for another: Rhun, the centre of the nutmeg trade, for the island of Manhattan. In 1621, the Dutch massacred and enslaved many of the Bandanese people and had them work on the nutmeg plantations; those who survived the massacre escaped to other parts of Indonesia, forcibly displaced by the Dutch throughout the 17^th century.^[4] I bring up these violent histories to insist on the scale at which Glow’s work operates. It tackles a long history of colonization, and while it shares a history of violent, forced displacement, it is important to resist homogenizing the experiences of colonization.

Glow addresses the gaps in this history by bringing in the Indigenous inhabitants of both islands included in the treaty. A video portion of the project begins with a resident of Rhun saying, “centuries ago, the people of the Hitu village and Hila village—the people here—started globalization in the world.”^[5] Positioning Rhun as one of the earliest sites of globalization is especially powerful when considering the island in relation to its counterpart in this project—this is one of the many ways in which this project addresses the gaps within the historical record. It is important to note that the Dutch control of nutmeg is one of the world’s first monopolies. This becomes visible through the work Glow is engaged in through the project Rhunhattan. While the Treaty of Breda is canonized in the archive, the Indigenous peoples affected by it are intentionally left out. Through Rhunhattan, Glow brings this erasure to the forefront and unsettles the geography that separates the islands of Manhattan and Rhun and their respective Indigenous populations, the Bandanese and the Lenape.

Rhunhattan as a project is firmly rooted in collaboration, with Glow as mediator, and in this form, it resists traditional museum display. In this way, the project addresses the limits of the archive, as theorized by Lowe, and remains in flux, changing with its display. The public can encounter Glow’s work in one of two ways, either through her website where she displays the fruits of the collaborative labour, such as a video work made in conjunction with Banda inhabitants or through its display in the form of an installation, which takes the form of hand drawn maps, a hand painted tea set, and nutmeg-scented clay sculptures. Due to its engagement and inclusion of various thinkers working collaboratively and in an ongoing way, the project is alive and cannot be contained within a canon. For example, the work of the Banda Working Group, consisting of scholars from the Netherlands and the United States acts as a supportive scaffolding to the project and occasionally hosts public outreach events such as an open talk and panel in 2021 in Vancouver at the University of British Columbia as part of the symposium Oceans as Archives.[6]  Glow describes another collaborative aspect of the project, “with the support of my Banda Working Group, I initiated an intimate exchange of sacred tobacco and nutmeg plants between Bandanese and Algonquin Elders.”^[7] This exchange is an act of care in the face of ongoing colonial violence as it seeks to work across the colonial divide. It also rewrites , making it something to bring Indigenous people together, rather than something that fuelled colonial conquests at the expense of Indigenous peoples and land. In this sense, Glow is engaged in the project of postcolonial constellation as theorized by Okwui Enwezor, wherein he argues for contemporary art to be understood, “not only through current discourses of globalization, but also historical ones of imperialism.”^[8] Glow returns to, in some ways, the origins of globalization by highlighting this exchange that enabled English colonial occupation of what is now known as one of the central nexus points of globalization: New York City.

The multiple of Rhunhattan, both as a collaborative project and as an installation, are inherently linked; the research produced by the working group helps to inform the artworks produced by Glow. Therefore, it is generative to look at the installation of the project in the form of Rhunhattan [Tearoom] at Wave Hill more closely. As Yu-Chieh Li writes in a review of Glow’s installation of Rhunhattan [Tearoom], the Indigenous peoples of both Manhattan and Rhun were, “conquered, obscured and silenced in historical records.”^[9] Glow resists the violent erasure enacted by the visual historical records by focusing on scent as a mode of knowledge production and in doing so illuminates the very element that brought about this colonial connection; nutmeg. At the time of the Dutch-English treaty that solidified the colonial rule of both Manhattan and Rhun, nutmeg was one of the world’s most sought-after spices and Rhun was its main producer.^[10] Materiality and intimacies are closely linked with one directly informing the other; for example, Glow uses nutmeg to provide, “a scent of colonial commerce.” Because colonialism and visuality are so linked, the favoring of the sensorial in lieu of the visual is an important element of Glow’s work.[11] Especially in the installation of Rhunhattan as a tearoom at the Wave Hill Public , Glow creates a place setting out of her own hand-drawn maps of Rhun and Manhattan, nutmeg, and porcelain painted in the Dutch fashion but with red as the dominant colour instead of blue to signal the violence of colonization.^[12] She uses installation as historical intervention and invites the viewer to take a seat and contend with the histories that surround them and shape the land upon which they find themselves.

The porcelain is an intriguing addition to the artwork not simply because of its history within trade systems between Asia and Europe, the bulk of which are too substantial to be addressed in a project of this scope, but how its inclusion works to illuminate Glow’s
positionality as an American woman of Taiwanese heritage. While this position may not be explicitly referenced in this project, Glow has expressed the importance of the idea that, “all islands are connected underwater,”[13] and the inclusion of the medium of porcelain adds another layer to the solidarities at play in the project. It widens the scope of Glow’s project by implicating the trade between Asian countries like China and Japan with the Netherlands occurring concurrently with the development of the spice trade in the 17^th century leading to a significant increase in the availability of porcelain products in centres of empire like Amsterdam.^[14] Paying attention to this history points again to Lowe’s project, which remarks, “it is fair to observe that there is distinct attention paid to the relationships between the matters classified within distinct stores.”^[15] By bringing in the object of porcelain, painted in a reworked Dutch style, Glow is directly addressing and investigating the relationships between the distinct histories. It is as if she is asking the viewer, what does it mean to think about these histories as inherently linked and dependent on each other? It is precisely because of the Dutch involvement in the spice trade that they were able to become such important importers of porcelain from China and Japan.

Another crucial component of Glow’s installation of Rhunhattan is the “clay form nutmegs […] scented with peppery notes inspired by colonial commerce.”^[16] This importance of this olfaction is twofold: firstly, it destabilizes the ideological distinction between art and body and secondly, it brings into view the question of environmental degradation. The use of scent in contemporary art is a highly loaded endeavor as it disrupts the closely regulated environment of the museum. The ideal temperature and humidity levels of a museum in order to preserve visual art have been in development since the end of World War II.^[17] In some ways, the modes of preservation of art, “have influenced the governance of environments outside the museum by helping to forge an ideology that opposes the natural to the social.”^[18] This distinction between natural and social, or put in other words, human versus nature, is a particularly persistent binary that puts the two in hierarchical opposition with the other wherein the human is always seen as having power over nature. This binary has been employed to align racialized bodies with nature as a way of justifying their exploitation during the colonial period. The subjugation of one over the other is precisely the relationship being shown in Rhunhattan [Tearoom] in which, the nature of Indonesia, symbolized in the scented clay nutmegs in the installation, is controlled by the Dutch colonial powers or Dutch society. Notably, Glow also decorates the porcelain with botanical drawings of various parts of the nutmeg plant such as the flower, the nut, and the leaves, therefore nature imposes itself on society, symbolized by the porcelain, which requires human intervention to make. This unsettles the presumed hierarchy between human and nature.

In the case of Rhunhattan, the consequences of viewing humans and nature as inherently separate are visible in multiple ways. Glow incorporates the scent of spices, which fuelled in part, the global expansion of colonialism. Glow notes that a guiding principle for her artistic practice is seeking to answer the question, what does colonialism smell like?^[19] This presents another way in which Rhunhattan is an inherently interdisciplinary project, drawing in not only a variety of histories and geographies, but also visual and olfactory components. Hsuan Hsu, in a discussion on the use of olfaction in contemporary art writes, “olfactory art is an ideal medium for provoking olfactors [Hsu’s subversive term for viewers of olfactory art] to reflect on what, if anything, environmental risk smells like.”^[20] By bringing scent into the exhibition space, Glow suggests that the walls of the institutions are more porous than one might expect—to scent and perhaps to the colonial projects that brought museums into being and continue to guide them today. This idea in and of itself has a necessary environmental message, pointing to urgency of action, because no safe is space, not even the regulated environment of the museum. In an open space such as a gallery, scent moves freely, cloaking anything in its path and lingering long after its appearance, mimicking the impacts of colonial expansion. Olfactory art in this context possesses a radical potential in that it can activate colonial legacies in a visceral sensory way without reproducing images of violence.

The impact of colonialism on contemporary modes of display requires consistent and thorough interrogation and re-evaluation. While Beatrice Glow’s Rhunhattan: A Tale of Two Islands functions on a number of levels to destabilize the dominant historical narrative, its existence at all is a testament to the intertwined histories of dispossession. The collaborative nature of Rhunhattan as well as its multi-sensorial modality act as interlocking pieces of a larger ongoing project to expose the ongoing legacies of colonial conquest. The ideas conveyed through Rhunhattan—the acknowledgement of the remnants of colonialism, the resistance of Indigenous peoples globally, community-centered practice—can be seen at play in Lenapehoking, the first ever exhibition of Lenape cultural belongings on their ancestral land, which took place earlier this year.[21] Beatrice Glow’s work offers us an opportunity to engage with difficult histories in a generative, collaborative way and it remains up to us to take advantage.

[2] Gijs Rommelse. “The role of mercantilism in Anglo-Dutch political relations, 1650-74” The Economic History Review, 63, no. 3 (2010): 591-611. doi: 10.1111/j.1468-0289.2009.00491.x.

[3]Peter V. Lape. “Historic Maps and Archaeology as a Means of Understanding Late Precolonial Settlement in the Banda Islands, Indonesia,” Asian Perspectives, vol. 41, no. 1 (2002):56.

[4] Hans Hägerdal. “Between resistance and co-operation: Contact zones in the Aru Islands in the VOC period,” Wacana, 20, no. 3 (2019): 485.

[5] Beatrice Glow, “Rhunhattan: A Tale of Two Islands,” YouTube, July 10, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfgI_EV-Hzo.

[6] Beatrice Glow. “Rhunhattan: A Tale of Two Islands.” Beatrice Glow. N.d. https://beatriceglow.org/#/rhunhattan/.

[7] Hsuan L. Hsu and David J. Vásquez, “The Materials of Art and the Legacies of Colonization: A Conversation with Beatrice Glow and Sandy Rodriguez,” Journal of Transnational American Studies, 13, no.1 (2022): 239, doi: 10.5070/T813158585.

[8] Jane Chin Davidson and Alpesh Kantilal Patel. “Okwui Enwezor and the Art of Curating” Journal of Contemporary African Art, 48 (2021): 10. doi: 10.1215/10757163-8971243.

[9] Yu-Chieh Li. “Beatrice Glow: Rhunhattan [Tearoom]: Review” Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, 3 (2017): 222, doi: 10.1163/23523085-00302015.

[10] Hsuan L. Hsu and David J. Vásquez, “The Materials of Art and the Legacies of Colonization: A Conversation with Beatrice Glow and Sandy Rodriguez,” Journal of Transnational American Studies, 13, no.1 (2022): 239, doi: 10.5070/T813158585.

[11] For further reading on the legacies of colonialism and visuality see Nicholas Mirzoeff’s The Right to Look or Gayatri Gopinath’s Unruly Visions.

[12] Yu-Chieh Li. “Beatrice Glow: Rhunhattan [Tearoom]: Review” Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, 3 (2017): 222, doi: 10.1163/23523085-00302015.

[13] Beatrice Glow. “Artist Statement” Beatrice Glow. N.d. https://beatriceglow.org/works#/rhunhattan-tearoom/.

[14] Anne Gerritsen. “Domesticating Goods from Overseas: Global Material Culture in the Early Modern Netherlands,” Journal of Design History, 29, no. 3 (2016): 236.

[15] Lisa Lowe, “The Intimacies of the Four Continents,” in The Intimacies of the Four Continents (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015): 5.

[16] Beatrice Glow. “Artist Statement” Beatrice Glow. N.d. https://beatriceglow.org/works#/rhunhattan-tearoom/.

[17] Hsuan L. Hsu. “Olfactory Art, Transcorporeality, and the Museum Environment,” Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, 4, no. 1 (2016): 4.

[18] Ibid., 5.

[19] Beatrice Glow. “Artist Statement” Beatrice Glow. N.d. https://beatriceglow.org/works#/rhunhattan-tearoom/.

[20] Hsuan L. Hsu. “Olfactory Art, Transcorporeality, and the Museum Environment,” Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, 4, no. 1 (2016): 11.

[21] Lenapehoking was on at the Greenpoint Library from January 20-April 30, 2022 and was curated by Lenape Elder, Joe Baker. Brooklyn Public Library, “Lenapehoking” Brooklyn Public Library, N.d. https://www.bklynlibrary.org/exhibitions/lenapehoking.