Postcolonial?

Partway through, you reach a statue of Leopold II still smeared with the red paint it wore when Ghent took it off the street. Nearby are a bench plate from apartheid South Africa reading "Whites Only" and a paperweight carrying Leopold's 1860 line "Il faut à la Belgique une colonie".

The show runs in four sections, from the structures of colonialism (1400s to 1945) through the end of empire and independence to "What now?", on inequality in policing, housing and schools today. It mixes 195 objects and documents with 25 contemporary artworks and eight filmed personal stories, which The Low Countries said "put a human face on colonialism".

Nadia Nsayi, writing there, called it groundbreaking but found the restitution section "rather superficial". VRT's reviewer felt it reads mainly as a retrospective and sidesteps present-day forms of colonialism, a pointed gap a few hundred metres from the European Commission. Entry is free, with texts in English, French, Dutch and German.