Rogue Agents of History, Wereld Museum, Installation View © Aad Hoogendoorn.
We are pleased to share that Larissa Sansour's major solo exhibition, Rogue Agents of History, is now on view at Wereldmuseum Amsterdam until 27 September 2026. The exhibition marks the artist's first major museum presentation in the Netherlands and is curated by Nat Muller. It brings together film, sculpture, photography and historical objects, premiering the newly commissioned film A Sunken Tale of Losses Delayed (2026), created in collaboration with writer and filmmaker Søren Lind.
Spanning Ottoman histories, contemporary geopolitics and speculative futures, Rogue Agents of History explores how fiction can challenge dominant historical narratives and imagine alternative pasts and futures. Throughout the exhibition, Sansour considers questions of identity, memory, belonging and loss, using speculative fiction as a means of examining how history is constructed, preserved and reclaimed.
At the heart of the exhibition is A Sunken Tale of Losses Delayed, a new film set aboard a ghostly Palestinian pirate ship travelling across centuries. Following a crew of spectral sailors recovering lost objects, displaced memories and forgotten histories, the work reflects on the movement of cultural heritage through time and across geographies. Filmed at sites connected to Dutch colonial history, including the Wereldmuseum Amsterdam depot, the Royal Tropical Institute (KIT), the National Maritime Museum and the VOC ship replica Batavia, the film examines the circulation of objects, stories and identities while blurring the boundaries between historical fact and fiction.
The exhibition also includes key works from Sansour's practice, including In the Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain (2016) and Familiar Phantoms (2022). Together with the new commission, these works investigate archaeology, mythology and inherited memory, proposing imagination as a powerful tool for rethinking history. Rather than documenting loss alone, Sansour constructs cinematic worlds that challenge established narratives and offer new visual languages through which Palestinian histories can be understood.
Through the dialogue between film, historical artefacts and material culture, Rogue Agents of History positions imagination as a form of resistance and repair, inviting audiences to reconsider how histories are written and who has the authority to shape them.
