‘White Balls on Walls’ Overview: Time With the Gatekeepers

From its tub-like exterior to its gallery partitions and huge convention room, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam is awash in white. But the Dutch documentary “White Balls on Walls” considerations a unique whiteness (and maleness) endemic in one of many Netherland’s cultural establishments. The film’s cheeky title comes from a protest that the arts-activist collective the Guerrilla Girls (or an offshoot) staged outdoors the museum in 1995.

The filmmaker Sarah Vos started following the museum’s director, Rein Wolfs, and his employees in 2019 as they got down to deal with variety and inclusion. The museum’s slogan, “Meet the icons of contemporary artwork,” had been met with scrutiny of the who-decides-what-is-iconic selection. Vos tracks these efforts by the peak of the pandemic and the social justice calls for wrought by the killing of George Floyd. There can be some awkward social distancing and a doubling down on Wolfs’s sense that the museum should embrace a richer array of artists, welcome a extra various demographic and, whereas it’s at it, rent extra individuals of coloration.

With entry to behind-the-scenes processes, the documentary will be instructive concerning the work of fixing legacy establishments, but additionally wincingly cautionary as Wolfs, his directors and curators get tousled in numbers and nomenclature. (“‘Gender stability,’ that sounds properly various,” a lady says in an early assembly.) Their inner conversations — about colonialism, gender and Dutch identification — turn out to be extra nuanced when individuals of coloration arrive. Charl Landvreugd, the museum’s head of analysis and curatorial observe, and the curators Vincent van Velsen and Yvette Mutumba, provide that nuance and provides context to the museum’s quandaries. But even they don’t at all times pierce the hermetically sealed really feel of the documentary.

White Balls on Walls
Not rated. In English and Dutch, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour half-hour. In theaters.