Decolonising Curating and the Museum in Southeast Asia | online lecture series

SOAS University and the Asian Civilisations Museum Singapore are offering a free lecture series on 'Decolonising Curating and the Museum in Southeast Asia'. Registration is required and places are limited.

This lecture series will explore what it means to decolonise the museum and curatorial practice in a Southeast Asian context. The speakers cover a range of topics, including the display of Buddhist and Hindu sculpture, ethnographic and colonial collections, curating contemporary art, and the use and exhibition of Southeast Asian material in western museums.

The series seeks to problematise the idea of decolonisation and emphasise the need for specificity when applying this concept and process in Southeast Asian contexts. The region is culturally diverse, and its experience of colonialism uneven. Given this, do all museums need to decolonise equally or even at all? What form would a decolonial curatorial practice take? What initiatives have institutions or individual practitioners carried out so far and how successful have they been? These are just some of the pertinent questions that the speakers will address.

Topics to be addressed include:

What Can and Does Decolonial Curatorial Practice Look like in a Southeast Asian Context?
Mining the Museum: Contemporary Art and Decolonial Practice in Southeast Asia
Must We Decolonise the Museum? Sacred and Ritual Art and the Raffles Collection in Singapore
The Politics of Greater India and Indonesian Collections in Museums of ‘Asian Art’

The webinars take place on Thursdays:

7-28 October 2021: 12pm London; 7pm Singapore
4-11 November 2021: 11am London; 7pm Singapore

The programme is jointly organised by the Southeast Asian Art Academic Programme, SOAS University of London, and the Asian Civilisations Museum, Singapore

Image: Headless Buddha image at the eighth century temple of Candi Sewu, Central Java, Indonesia