Organizer: SOAS Southeast Asian Art Academic Programme and the Asian Civilisations Museum, Singapore
Lecture Series: Decolonizing Curating and the Museum in Southeast Asia Lecture Series
Description:
Since the nineteenth century, today’s South and Southeast Asia have become part of scholarly and popular thinking that defines the region as a single, superior, Hindu-Buddhist civilization with its source in India. This double lecture addresses the continuing legacies of this imagined Greater India via academia, museums, and popular culture worldwide. In museums of so-called ‘Asian Art’ in the West, well-choreographed exhibitions strategically use light and space to emphasize the spiritual power and inner beauty of Hindu and Buddhist statues, evoking ideas of Greater India. In this way, they obfuscate the violence underlying how objects were collected, researched, and interpreted, and they depict Southeast Asia – and thus, central in this talk, today’s Muslim-majority Indonesia – as the passive recipient of a superior Indian civilization. In contrast, the National Museum of Indonesia in Jakarta, for instance, tells the history of Indonesia. Bloembergen, a historian, and Mechling, an art historian, will explore from their respective perspectives and research the impact of the Greater India phenomenon on ancient Hindu and Buddhist objects from Indonesia, reflecting on how to decolonize the museum, but also on what it is then that actually needs to be being decolonized.
Speakers:
Historian Marieke Bloembergen is a senior researcher at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) and professor in Archival and Postcolonial Studies at Leiden University. Her most recent monograph, co-authored with Martijn Eickhoff, is The Politics of Heritage in Indonesia. A cultural history (Cambridge: 2020). In her lecture, she dwells on her current book project-in-progress, entitled 'Indonesia and the politics of Greater India: a moral geography, 1880s-1990s'.
Mathilde Mechling received her Ph.D. in 2020 from University Sorbonne Nouvelle and Leiden University. Her thesis, which she is currently adapting into a book publication, focused on Hindu and Buddhist bronze statuary from the Indonesian Archipelago, critically engaging with the legacies of colonial scholarship and developing an interdisciplinary methodology to study the bronzes.
Discussant:
Panggah Ardiyansyah is a Ph.D. candidate in History of Art and Archaeology at SOAS University of London. His main interest is on the afterlives and knowledge production of Hindu-Buddhist materials in Indonesia, and he recently co-edited Returning Southeast Asia’s Past: Objects, Museums, and Restitution (with Louise Tythacott, 2021).
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