Decolonising Curating and the Museum in Southeast Asia

Jointly organised by the Southeast Asian Art Academic Programme, SOAS University of London, and the Asian Civilisations Museum, Singapore.

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.

Programme

Organiser: SOAS Southeast Asian Art Academic Programme and the Asian Civilisations Museum, Singapore