The group aims to explore the historical roots, developments, transformations, and current challenges of museums in India and Europe, both from a scholarly and practical comparative perspective. The initial thematic frame was kept broad in order to develop common questions, approaches, and perhaps collaborations out of ongoing meetings and discussions.
Main coordinator: Mirjam Brusius, University of Oxford
This group was first initiated in 2010 at the occasion of the cooperation of the museums in Dresden and the Indian Museum in Calcutta. The group aims to explore the historical roots, developments, transformations, and current challenges of museums in India and Europe, both from a scholarly and practical comparative perspective. The initial thematic frame was kept broad in order to develop common questions, approaches, and perhaps collaborations out of ongoing meetings and discussions.
Three main topic areas have emerged:
- Museums and cities;
- Compared history of museums in India and Europe, potentially spanning the historiography of Indian collections prior to the colonial area; the history of colonial museums in India against the background of developments in Europe; and accounts of contemporary (art) museums in India in the context of larger regional or transcontinental developments.
- Explorations of the emergent museum, referring to more experimental and dynamic ways of museological practice in a global context, which seek to rethink the idea and role of the museum as a public institution.
Classical museums and collections in contemporary contexts - Berlin, May 3, 2010
(co-organized with Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden)
The first workshop of the Museums and Art History focus group was mainly dedicated to the formation, development and the today’s status of the Indian Museum in Calcutta in comparison with European museums models. Founded in 1814 on the initiative of the Asiatic Society and first located in the Society’s premises, the Indian Museum constitutes not only the first such institution in Asia, but belongs to the oldest museum institutions world-wide. Since 1875 the museum is accommodated in a historic colonial building, which until today holds a crowning position in the cityscape of Calcutta.
Arising from the broad exchange of information and details embodied in the contributions (by director of the Indian Museum, Kishor Basa, and by Tapati Guha-Thakurta from CSSS, Calcutta), the discussion developed, ranging over and including the following points:
- The role of the Asiatic Society, founded by William Jones in 1784, in the establishment and development of the Indian Museum
- The role/interest for scholarly collections in the 18th- 19th century.
- The formation of the Indian Museum in the context of the Universal exhibition of the 19th Century.
- The role models for the Indian Museum and the possibility or impossibility of assimilating it within a typology based on European museum models.
- The long tradition of private (colonial or indigenous royal and court-) collections in India.
- The practice of decontextualization of objects in the museum.
- Does the Musée de l’Europe present a transferable model for a collective museum for South Asia?
- The role of the Indian Museum with its unique institutional and collection history, in the international post-colonial discourse.
- The opportunities and threats of multidisciplinary museums.
- The visitor structure and visitor expectations at the Indian Museum.
- The meaning of the historical architecture of the museum for the urban image of Calcutta.
Museums and Art History - Berlin, May 3-4, 2011
The purpose of the second meeting was to develop a collaborative research agenda which the Museums group would then explore over the following three years. To that end, the agenda was drafted to allow a large variety of perspectives and questions to be present in the discussions.
Notably, the following topics were discussed:
- Session I: The Pre-Colonial Museum
- Session II: Museum in the Colonial Era
- Session III: Contemporary Museums, comparative approaches
- Synthesis / Perspectives
Comparative History of Museums in India and Europe - New Delhi, September 14-15, 2012
Starting point for the workshop was the observation that India presently experiences profound changes in economy, society and politics. They call into mind crisis-shaken Europe in the late 18th and 19th centuries when drastic reforms were brought about by enlightenment and industrialization. In this historic context of a decisive structural transformation of the public sphere, the formation of the modern nation-state ran parallel to the establishment of the institution of the museum. As a result, the idea of the nation and the museum appear to be strongly linked to each other. Museums were often ascribed the function of constructing and representing national identity. Or, to put it more generally, they were regarded as instruments of stabilizing the civic society.
Against the backdrop, the workshop was intended as a platform for an interdisciplinary and international exchange on the following questions: Which role do museums in today’s India play, or which roles are assigned to them in the process of remaking Indian society? Is the recent explosion of private initiatives to found museums and to render collections accessible to a larger public expressive of the importance of the institution in a society being heavily transformed? Which significance is attributed to the objects/artifacts themselves in the framework of an exhibition? And finally, do we find any parallels between India and Europe when looking at the museum culture on both (sub) continents in the past? In how far might a historic comparative perspective help to shed light onto the function of museums and of publicly displayed artifacts in present day India?
In order to tackle questions like these the workshop comprised four sessions each of which focused substantial issues of museological discourse and museum practice:
- Collecting/Gathering;
- Giving;
- Ownership vs. Custodianship;
- Museum Effect.
In each session an opening statement was provided by both a European and an Indian scholar that provided the basis for the discussion among all participants and enhanced the discursive structure of the workshop.
Tales from the crypt : Museum storage and meaning - London, October 30-31, 2014
The next workshop of the Museums and Art History focus area will take place on October 30th and 31st, 2014, at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Theme of the workshsop is "Tales from the Crypt: Museum Storage and Meaning", it is convened by Mirjam BRUSIUS (Oxford University) and Kavita SINGH (School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University).
It is organised with the help of the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Abstract
Museums are about display. But are they really? In spite of recent curatorial attempts to exhibit ’visible storage’, prevailing debates in the history of museums and collecting are mainly centred around questions of exhibiting, display and spectatorship. This kind of discourse, however, distorts the museum in many ways: it ignores the fact that museums do not just consist of exhibition halls but of vast hidden spaces; it leaves millions of objects out of our museum histories; and lastly, it presents the museum as an organized and stable space, in which only museological ’results’ are visible not the intermediate stage of their coming into being.
Display seems to be about the structured, purposeful, strategic gathering of things according to a system, the features of which are clearly defined.
What remains out of sight is the fact that the majority of museum objects lie in storage. As a result, not only a vast physical but also important epistemological and semantic aspect of museums and their collections are eliminated from our discussions.
The binary between ’display’ and ’backstage’ of museums has previously evoked the assumption that the exhibition area functions as a kind of theatre with objects ’perform’ on stage, while in the back they are processed from their existence as a mere ’thing’ to a proper artefact. But there is much more to say about museum storage. Backstage areas of museums are not simply areas where potential display objects are kept. They perform functions and fulfil intentions that, when studied, reveal deep purposes of the museum that go well beyond a mere history of display. The backstage of museums, for example, has often included archives, study centres and libraries, which have been and still are centres of scholarly pursuit. In fact, until around 1900 museums were major resources and the major sites for advanced research in many disciplines. The vast reserve collections could include materials that a museum acquired without ever having intended to put them on display. Thus, an object that was judged to be worth collecting might also be one that was always destined to remain in storage. This might be because it was unwieldy - perhaps because it was too large or too small to display; or perhaps because it was aesthetically unremarkable or incomprehensible or too fragmentary; or perhaps it was judged to be morally sensitive, as say were human remains and pornography which might be collected but would be stored for perusal by a chosen few.
Thinking about the threshold between storage and display provokes not only questions about the mysterious ’backstage’ of museums, but entirely new questions about canonization, the politics of collecting, the ethics of preservation and economies of storage and display; categories that may and will be discussed very differently in India, Europe or elsewhere.
Selected publications for this focus area
- Museum Storage and Meaning: Tales from the Crypt, edited by Mirjam Brusius, Kavita Singh, London: Routledge (Routledge Research in Museum Studies), 2018, 300 pages.