AMSTERDAM — Whenever I encounter artworks or architecture from the so-called “Dutch Golden Age,” perhaps more accurately known as its colonial period — a daily occurrence since my relocation to the Netherlands last year — I’m reminded of Teju Cole’s reevaluation of Vermeer’s paintings as “an artifact inescapably involved in the world’s messiness.” Cole argues that the nation’s history of violent extraction and global oppression during that era, notably its instrumental role in the slave trade, suffuses Vermeer’s seemingly innocent scenes of a milkmaid or a woman in a pearl necklace. Works that use ultramarine paint made from lapis lazuli, or portraits depicting something as benign as silvery cutlery, abstract the vicious methods that produce such wares. The paint was likely sourced from a 17th-century Afghan mine, while the precious metal probably came from the brutal Potosí silver excavation in Bolivia — both items available due to the Dutch East and West India Company’s key role in capitalist exploitation. That’s to say nothing about the country’s active involvement in the transatlantic slave trade, trafficking 1.6 million enslaved people over two centuries and abetting the largest forced migration in history. These facts came to mind when I encountered Kimsooja’s delicate bottari, or traditional Korean textile bundles of cherished objects carried during travel, dotting the floor of the Oude Kerk (Old Church), Amsterdam’s oldest building-turned-contemporary art institution, as the city celebrates its 750th anniversary. Built 300 years before the Dutch colonial period, the church expanded into its current iteration in 1570, 30 years before the Dutch East India Company prepared to embark on a campaign that would establish Amsterdam as an economic powerhouse through proto-capitalist means. “The church could exist, flourish, and expand partly thanks to the proceeds of the major trading companies in the Golden Age,” reads the church’s About Us page on their website, adding that some names and coats of arms “immortalized” in the building were part of that exploitation. Though it does not explicitly state this intention in exhibition materials, with its injection of Kimsooja’s quietly disruptive bottari, a form central to her four-decade practice, To Breathe — Mokum, accidentally or not, illuminates Dutch colonial history and skewers contemporary right-wing attitudes around diversity and migration that resist multiculturalism in favor of a dominant cultural or national identity. The name of the exhibition derives from the Yiddish word mokum, meaning “city” or “safe haven,” contradicting the recently dissolved Dutch government, whose anti-immigration party attempted to freeze asylum applications and limit family reunification, among other far-right measures. Bottari only partially make up the site-specific exhibition. Each bundle is filled with donated clothing from Amsterdam’s various cultural communities, while the wrapping cloths themselves range from West African wax prints to not-as-easily-identifiable linens. Diffraction grating film serves as the exhibition’s other chief element. Pasted over 44,000 of the church’s imposing window panes, the iridescent film refracts ever-shifting sunlight into a shattering pool of color. Multicolor light swaddles the delicate bottari, wresting attention away from the church’s monumental, gilded organ or ancient stone graves that tile the floor, toward sacks filled with migration histories, reveling in the glory of diversity inextricably woven into and held within a discrete, formalized object. Look up to take in the grand architecture, and you might trip on a bottari or find yourself distracted by a rainbow — a visceral reminder that this seemingly beautiful paean to the Dutch national project might be more subversive than its exhibition materials suggest. Like Vermeer’s milkmaids, these bottari are inextricable from their contemporary world, one in which increasingly nativist governments seek to sanitize the past and censor the present. Installation views of Kimsooja: To Breathe — Mokum at Oude KerkInstallation view of Kimsooja: To Breathe — Mokum at Oude KerkInstallation views of Kimsooja: To Breathe — Mokum at Oude KerkInstallation views of Kimsooja: To Breathe — Mokum at Oude KerkInstallation view of Kimsooja: To Breathe — Mokum at Oude KerkInstallation views of Kimsooja: To Breathe — Mokum at Oude KerkInstallation views of Kimsooja: To Breathe — Mokum at Oude KerkInstallation views of Kimsooja: To Breathe — Mokum at Oude KerkKimsooja: To Breathe – Mokum continues at Oede Kerk (Oudekerksplein 23, Amsterdam, Netherlands) through November 9. The exhibition was organized by the institution.