Dr Panggah Ardiyansyah

Panggah Ardiyansyah recently completed his PhD in the Department of History of Art and Archaeology at SOAS University of London. Prior to his doctoral project, he had spent more than a decade working professionally as a heritage educator for Borobudur Temple in Magelang, Indonesia, where he was responsible for designing and implementing guided tours and travelling exhibitions. 

In 2021, he co-edited a volume entitled Returning Southeast Asia’s Past: Objects, Museums, and Restitution. This volume explores the lives of artefacts which have been repatriated from the West to museums in Southeast Asia and is the first edited volume entirely devoted to object restitution to this region. In 2022, he worked as a consultant for the British Institute for International and Comparative Law’s project entitled Beyond Restitution: Exploring the Story of Cultural Objects After Their Repatriation. For this project, he investigated the afterlives of materials returned to Indonesia, including the much-coveted Diponegoro kris returned by the Netherlands and religious objects donated to Nias Heritage Museum from abroad. Between 2022 and 2025, he was an academic core member for Getty-funded Circumambulating Objects: On Paradigms of Restitution of Southeast Asian Art (CO-OP). 

Panggah has published his works through various media, including chapters in edited volumes, journal articles, blog posts, and podcasts.

Panggah works at the intersection of colonial and imperial history, digital collections and archives, and the digital mediation of history and culture. Trained as an art historian, his interest lies broadly in the production of knowledge related to historical and/or religious materials both on-site and in museums. This preoccupation with knowledge production has been directed towards probing new methodologies to decolonise the field of art history and archaeology, in particular for Southeast Asian art. 

His PhD thesis focuses on the afterlives of Hindu-Buddhist materials in premodern Indonesia, a project which aims to contribute to decolonising the field of Indonesian art history and archaeology. He reads broadly on Southeast Asian art, including the ways in which ancient materials have been re-used and appropriated in more recent times through various productions of knowledge. 

Panggah's interest in the colonial collection has led him to engage closely with the questions around object restitution and how this process can decolonise the ways we write the histories of the arts from the region.

Circumambulating Objects: On Paradigms of Restitution of Southeast Asian Art