Must We Decolonise the Museum? Sacred and Ritual Art and the Raffles Collection in Singapore
Channel: SOAS University of London
Date: 2021-10-26

This event is part of the Decolonising Curating and the Museum in Southeast Asia lecture series. Jointly organised by the Southeast Asian Art Academic Programme, SOAS University of London, and the Asian Civilisations Museum, Singapore.

Speakers: Conan Cheong and Faisal Husni (Assistant Curators for Southeast Asia, Asian Civilisations Museum)
Discussant: Sujatha Arundathi Meegama (Assistant Professor of Art History, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)
Chair: Stephen Murphy (SOAS)

Unravelling the legacies of colonialism is a pertinent question for Singaporeans today, as public response to the nationwide Bicentennial in 2019 made clear. The Asian Civilisations Museum, established by a government-appointed task force 30 years after Singapore’s independence from Britain, inherited the “ethnology” collection of the 19th-century Raffles Library and Museum, as well as archaeological material from the Malay World, notably Hindu and Buddhist objects excavated from Bujang Valley, on the Malay Peninsula, by H. G. Quaritch Wales in the 1930s. ACM continues to acquire art and material culture to fulfil its mission to “foster understanding of the diverse heritage cultures of Singapore, their interconnections, and their connections with the world”.

In this talk, two ACM curators consider how decoloniality might take shape at the museum, with a focus on curatorial and exhibition practices, past and present. How were the collections and displays of the Raffles Museum – which incorporated antiquarian interest in Hindu-Buddhist traces, ethnographic collecting in regional communities, contemporary local arts and crafts, natural history, and finds from prehistoric archaeological expeditions – used to construct an image of British Malaya and its people? And with the transition from colonial institution to national museum housing the multicultural memories of newly created Singapore citizens, how much of the task of questioning the structures of colonial knowledge is now left for us to do?