The Postcolonial Heritage Research Group is a postgraduate research network aimed at providing a common platform to share writings and ideas, propose events, while promoting complex and provocative research across a number of inter-related questions pertaining to representations of empire, colonialism, and slavery at museums and art galleries. Organisers:

Samuel Aylett, PhD Student at the Open University

I studied History (BA Hons) and Modern World History (MA) at Brunel University London from 2008-2015. After graduating I moved to Berlin and worked as a consultant from 2014-2016. I am currently reading for my PhD in Empire and Colonial History at the Open University (FT). My PhD looks at shifting representations of empire and British colonialism at the Museum of London from 1976-2007. Broadly speaking, I am interested in museums as sites for examining the cultural impact of empire and decolonisation in Britain in the twentieth century, and how the legacies of empire continue to shape Britain's past, present and future.

Matthew Jones, PhD Student at the University of Sussex

Matthew Jones is a AHRC CHASE-funded doctoral student in the department of Art History. The current title of his thesis is 'Building a Genealogy of Post-Colonial Museums'. This research will chart the changing ways in which museums through their displays have negotiated the issues raised by presenting narratives of empire and colonialism. It will specifically look at how the British Slave Trade has been presented in narratives in curated spaces. Through this the project will explore issues surrounding narrative, identity, trauma and memory. Ultimately it aims to contribution to how we understand the role of museums and the impact of curating in a post-colonial society.

Adiva Lawrence, PhD Student at the University of Hull

I am a PhD candidate at the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation at the University of Hull. I am funded by the AHRC Heritage Consortium. My PhD looks at curatorial projects that explore the legacies of transatlantic slavery in museums, from a transnational perspective, with a particular focus on the use of images and art. I have written about art in Brazil and about women artists from the African diaspora. I am a 2019 Junior Research Fellow at the Research Centre for Material Culture in Leiden.

Schedule

Day One

09:30 - 10:00 Welcome and Registration

10:00 - 12:00 PANEL 1 CHAIR: Dr Renate Dohmen, The Open University - Charlotte Johnson - AHRC Midlands4Cities, Shelley Angelie Saggar – Science Museum/Wellcome Collection, Janine Francois – Tate & University of Bedfordshire

12:00 - 13:00 Workshop (Alice Procter UCL & Uncomfortable Arts Tours TBC)

13:00 - 14:00 Lunch

14:00 - 16:30 PANEL 2 CHAIR: Prof John Oldfield, Director of the Wilberforce Institute - Dr Hannah Young – IHR & University of Hull, Dr Sarah Thomas – Birkbeck UoL, Sophie Campbell – University of Nottingham (10 min break in the middle)

16:30 - 17:00 Coffee/Tea Break

17:00 - 19:00 Keynote by Dr. Corinne Fowler (University of Leicester/Colonial Countryside) & Reception

Day Two

09:00 - 09:30 Welcome and Registration

09:30 - 11:30 PANEL 3 CHAIR Prof Alan Lester, University of Sussex - Panel 3 Jack Davy – UEA, Dr Kate McMillan - King’s College London, Jatinder Kailey – Historic Royal Palaces Kensington Palace

11:30 - 11:45 Coffee/Tea Break

11:45 - 13:45 PANEL 4 CHAIR Prof JoAnn McGregor, University of Sussex - Kaisa Tomasiewicz – IWM & University of Brighton, Dr Sarah Cheang – The Research Collective for Decolonising Fashion, Joel Fagan – Paisley Art Gallery and Museum

13:45 - 14:45 Lunch

14:45 - 15:15 Travel to Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove

15:15 - Close Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove Workshop CHAIR Dr Helen Mears Keeper and Lecturer in Design History, University of Brighton - Judith Ricketts & Tony Kalume – BME Heritage Network

Tickets/Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-new-museum-paradigm-shifting-representations-of-empire-tickets-65790837165 (please share via your networks) Address: Arts A, Room 108A, University of Sussex, Falmer, BN1 9RH, UK Contact email: postcolonialheritage2019@gmail.com Getting here: https://www.sussex.ac.uk/about/directions If you need any assistance on the day please feel free to contact Sam Aylett on +44 7901 556 133.

Rationale

The New Museum Paradigm

It is widely held that the chronological development of ‘universal’ museums and their collections imitate the

contours of imperial history. In recent years, this claim has led many museums in Europe and across the world

to reconfigure their focus, appearing as places more inclusive of cultural diversity, in an open desire to move

away from their colonial roots.

In this context, archives and their interpretative methodologies are being redefined, leading to re-readings

of historical narratives and to the normalisation of curatorial settings appealing to emotions, which

sometimes make use of artistic methodologies. Exhibition projects thereby become sites of formation

utopian narratives in which knowledge of the past can be used to shape better presents and futures. In this,

museums have become increasingly reliant on external sources - such as artists or communities - to provide

the critical work necessary to redefine narratives, interpretations and methodologies.

In Britain, the beginnings of this phenomenon can be traced back to the late 1980s, when, fuelled by the

discourse of multiculturalism, museums began to re-engage with histories and legacies of Empire, not least

because communities that had come to Britain as citizens of Empire in large numbers in the late-1940s, and

their descendants, began to make demands for better representation both politically and culturally. More

recently, the commemoration of the bicentenary of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 2007,

which occurred in a milieu of memory and museum booms, marked a turning point in how museums use

memory to engage and negotiate the imperial past.

Other European countries have seen comparable developments. Examples of projects seeking to address and

correct the imperial bias of museum displays can be found in Germany, with Clementine Deliss’s projects at

the Weltkulturen ethnographic museum of Frankfurt, which involved interventions by contemporary artists,

or the recent refurbishments of the Royal Museum of Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium. In the Netherlands,

two major museums, the Tropenmuseum and the Rijksmuseum, are planning to open exhibitions about

colonialism and slavery, in an effort to reinterpret their collections. In 2018, the report written by Senegalese

scholar Felwine Sarr and French academic Bénédicte Savoy, commissioned by the French president

Emmanuel Macron, on guidelines to repatriate African artefacts present in French museum collections,

sparked a debate that went beyond French postcolonial context.

As these initiatives are gaining more visibility, the political and historical grounds they rest on as well as their

potential limits need to be understood and critically engaged with.

Memory Boom

Memory has become increasingly employed by museums as another framework of interpretation and

contextualisation of historical events. Not only museums, but tangible heritage more broadly is implicated.

Recent debates around the removal of statues, have highlighted the polarised nature of debates about our

past and how it should be remembered and represented, the most notorious example in the UK, being the

statue of Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College, Oxford.

Arnold-de Simine Silke locates this phenomenon in the concurrent museum and memory booms of the 2000s

which resulted in museums being seen as a panacea of social exclusion. In turn, this led to new museums not

based on collections but on historical events, a shift from being a storehouse of knowledge to being

inseparable from social consciousness.1

Within the rise of memorial focused museums, many new problems have emerged for museum practitioners.

Paul Williams locates this in the contradiction of the memorial museum functioning as a memorial site seen

to be a place of refuge in history as well as a history museum which by contrast is presumed to be concerned

with interpretation, contextualisation and critique. The coalescing of the two, Williams argues, suggests there

is an increasing desire to add both a moral framework to the narration of historical events and to provide

more in-depth contextual explanations to commemorative acts.2 As a result, a number of these projects

appear caught within multiple, sometimes competing, agendas, which, added to the institutional, political

and financial constraints - for example, the reliance on ‘anniversaries’ to get funding -, can lead to ambiguous

narratives.

Research Network

When, how, and why have these shifts taken places across museums and art galleries? What new practices

have been developed as a result of this shift? In what ways have these new practices engendered more

serious and accurate representations of empire, colonialism, and slavery? To what extent has the ‘post-

museum’3 model allowed for more critical engagements with histories of empire and slavery?

This research network seeks to put perspectives from researchers working on related questions in dialogue,

by providing a common platform to share writings and ideas, propose events, while promoting complex and

provocative research. In doing so, we are concerned with a number of inter-related questions pertaining to

this new museum paradigm as it relates to representations of empire, colonialism, and slavery.

We welcome approaches that engage in these issues critically and question the terms of these debates and

hope to draw interdisciplinary links between different contexts of museum traditions in how they engage

with the themes of imperialism, colonialism and slavery. We are interested in bringing together perspectives

from Europe, North American, South America and Africa.

1 Arnold-de Simine Silke, mediating Memory in the Museum: Trauma, Empathy and Nostalgia, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 7-9. 2 Paul Williams, Memorial Museums: The Global Rush to Commemorate Atrocities, (New York; 2007), p. 8. 3 The ‘post-museums’ was a concept developed by Eilean Hooper-Greenhill to distinguish between the ‘universal’ type museums and a more recent museum model characterised by new architectural forms, focusing more on concerns around power and community engagements, inclusion of multiple-epistemic communities in displays and workshops, and a democratisation of curatorial power.

Keynote and Workshop Keynote Address: Dr Corinne Fowler, University of Leicester & Director of the Colonial Countryside Project Dr. Fowler specialises in contemporary writing by black and Asian Britons, as well as travel writing. She is the author and co-author of numerous books including Chasing Tales: Travel Writing, Journalism and the History of British Ideas about Afghanistan (Rodopi, 2008), Postcolonial Manchester: Diaspora Space and the Devolution of Literary Culture (MUP, 2013), and Travel and Ethics (Routledge, 2013). Her forthcoming book is a critical-creative study called Green Unpleasant Land: Creative Responses to Rural Britain’s Colonial Connections (Peepal Tree Press).

Dr. Fowler also leads an Arts Council/Heritage Lottery project called ‘Colonial Countryside: Reinterpreting National Trust Houses’. Colonial Countryside is a remarkable project which assembles authors, writers, historians and primary pupils to explore country houses’ Caribbean and East India Company connections. Already, over 100 primary school children have visited 10 National Trust houses, and each child is crafting short personal essays and fictions based on their experience and research (of which there are examples available). Some of the children are giving guided tours of properties. Others are developing printed guides to houses’ colonial connections for visitors.

Display it like you stole it: Alice Procter, Historian of material culture based at UCL and founder of Uncomfortable Art Tours

Alice Procter started her Uncomfortable Art Tours in 2017 as part of the Antiuniversity Now festival. Uncomfortable Art Tours ‘focus on how major institutions came into being against a backdrop of imperialism. On each tour, we unravel the role colonialism played in shaping and funding a major national collection, looking at the broader material history of celebrated works: where the money comes from, the ways they’ve been displayed, and the ideological aesthetics at work. The history of British art is also the history of empire and genocide, written by collectors who traded in landscapes and lives.’

Alice also promotes ‘display it like you stole it’ a critical call for museums to rethink the politics of display in their museums, focusing on critical questions around labelling, ownership, dissent, and authorial voice, who is included and who is excluded.

Participants Dr Sarah Cheang – Decolonizing and refashioning objects in the ethnographic museum This paper explores the background and objectives of an inter-disciplinary workshop that the RCDF is co-organizing with the Dutch National Museum of World Cultures. The workshop in November 2019 aims to re-think and re-contextualize fashion, re-situating museum objects of adornment as ‘fashion’. An object-led, think-tank approach aims to collaboratively identify new tools for thinking about fashion objects, push the envelope of decolonial affordances and produce a new and inclusive statement on fashion curation. We welcome the opportunity to share approaches and objectives as we finalize this workshop format. The Research Collective for Decolonising Fashion (RCDF; formerly known as the NonWesternFashionConference) was established in 2012 to end stubbornly persistent Eurocentric underpinnings of dominant fashion discourse and to construct alternative narratives. The RCDF argues that fashion systems are diverse, whether independent of (historically), or influenced by (more recently), Western-dominated fashion. It encourages critical investigation and dialogue into that commonly denied, forgotten or otherwise hidden diversity, and explores interconnections among fashion systems outside the dominant ‘world fashion city’ network, by providing a multidisciplinary and multicultural forum where new critical paradigms can be developed from cross-cultural perspectives. While Euro – and ethnocentric frameworks of thinking inherited from the Enlightenment have been fruitfully confronted by other disciplines such as anthropology and art history, they have remained stubbornly rooted in fashion studies – a problem that in itself begs for scrutiny. Charlotte Johnson: - Testimonial: a critical reflection on the display of a monumental vase This paper will present a critical view of the curation of the display ‘Testimonial: The life story of a monumental vase’. It will use the display as a way to think through how and why different histories are centred, ignored or relegated, intentionally or by carelessness. It will reflect upon the scale of ‘colonial aphasia’ that continues to underpin strategies of display and the impact the ‘intuited chain of equivalence between ‘heritage’ and the celebratory’ (Stoler, 2011, Edwards and Mead, 2013.) Charlotte Johnson was Assistant Curator of the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum from 2016-2019, where she co-curated the displays Testimonial and Visual Feast. She will begin her AHRC Midlands4Cities funded PhD in autumn 2019. Entitled Imperial Connections: re-examining Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire her project is a Collaborative Doctorial Award between the University of Birmingham, the University of Leicester and the National Trust. Charlotte has worked at museums and historic houses, including Museums Sheffield, Vaux-le-Vicomte and Chatsworth House. She holds undergraduate and post-graduate degrees from the Courtauld Institute of Art, where she studied eighteenth-century French decorative arts and interiors. Dr Hannah Young - Confronting slave-ownership at the Victoria and Albert Museum The paper will explore one example of attempting to make a critical intervention within a major national museum. It will discuss my experience of undertaking this research at the V&A and working with artist-in-residence Victoria Adukwei Bulley, who has created a series of five short films and poems (‘A Series of Unfortunate Inheritances’) that unearth the names, lives and experiences of individuals whose enslavement is ineffably tied to objects held in the museum’s collections. It will highlight how important critical interventions can be in helping museums to engage with more complex and inclusive histories, while also discussing the difficulties involved in embedding such work within colonial institutions. Dr Hannah Young is an Economic History Society Tawney Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research and the University of Hull. Awarded her PhD from UCL in 2017, her research explores gender, family and absentee slave-ownership in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. She also has a keen interest in heritage and public history and has worked at the Victoria and Albert Research Institute (VARI) as a Public Engagement Fellow. In September 2019 she will begin a three-year lectureship in nineteenth-century British history at the University of Southampton.

Dr. Sarah Thomas - Slavery, Patronage and the Love of Art: Slave-ownership and the politics of collecting in early nineteenth-century Britain Over the course of the 1820s, as British slave-owners were drawn increasingly into a bitter and contested debate about the future of slavery, the nation’s art institutions were thriving. The foundation of a National Gallery in 1824 was the culmination of several decades of lobbying from various quarters, and the concomitant rise of private collections in Britain. The wealth and confidence of British art collectors and connoisseurs in the period is amply demonstrated in a grand painting by Dutch artist Pieter Christoffel Wonder, Patrons and Lovers of Art (1830). My paper takes this painting and its studies as the starting point for seeking to understand how the brutal system of colonial slavery infiltrated the world of aesthetics and taste at the time, and what drew individual slave-owners towards the cultivated realm of the public art museum. What was the role of key slave owners in Britain's cultural history during this formative period? I seek to establish a broader acknowledgement that the politics of empire – and race most specifically – played a role in the emergence of major art museums, as a portion of the wealth generated by slavery was directed towards the acquisition of Old Master and British paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures in the years leading up to emancipation in 1833.

Sarah Thomas is Lecturer in History of Art & Museum Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. She was a curator in Australian art museums for many years. Her current research interests focus on the art history and museology of the British empire, the role and particularities of the itinerant artist, the iconography of slavery and the cultural legacies of British slave-ownership. Her book, Witnessing Slavery: Art and Travel in the Age of Abolition, is being published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale University Press in September 2019. Other publications include: ‘Envisaging a Future for Slavery: Agostino Brunias and the Imperial Politics of Labor and Reproduction’ (Eighteenth-Century Studies, September 2018); ‘The Spectre of Empire in the British Art Museum’ (Museum History Journal , 2013) and ‘Violence and Memory: Slavery in the Museum’, in World Art and the Legacies of Colonial Violence, Daniel Rycroft (ed), Ashgate Publishing, 2013). Dr. Jack Davy - “The howling and pain around me”: Native Americans and UK museum spaces In June this year, the first Native American play produced at Shakespeare’s Globe was performed by Mohegan actor and write Madeline Sayet. In the dramatic and emotional performance of “Where We Belong” she quotes extensively from a tour of the British Museum she was given by an academic. The academic in the play is “disdainful”, and the Native American gallery “a mash of mislabelled indigenous objects, like varying nations crowded into a rail car”. This paper is an examination of contemporary Native American concern with the trajectory of UK museum curation based on extensive interviews, suggestions for improvement, and my own transition from participant in this structure to opponent of it.

After an MA in Museum Studies, I worked for the British Museum from 2008-2017 managing the Native North American collections and facilitating Indigenous engagement with those collections. I obtained my PhD in anthropology based on those same collections and worked for two years as a curator on the new World Galleries at the Horniman Museum before taking up a post-doctoral position at the University of East Anglia on the Beyond the Spectacle project, examining the history of Native American interactions within the UK. Janine Francois - ‘Who is the ‘Britain’ within Tate Britain?’ A Black Feminist responds. ‘Safe(r) spaces’ has reached mainstream attention with arguments for and against its use; ‘safe(r) spaces’ are often presented as an infringement on ‘freedom of speech.’ However, they date back to the women’s liberation movements of the 1970s, where feminists were demanding separatists’ spaces from cis-gendered men. Whilst competing definitions circulate, this paper will define what a ‘safe(r) space’ is within an arts museum context by problematising whether Tate Britain can be a 'safe(r) space’ to discuss race and cultural differences? Tate Britain is an art museum entrusted to the ‘British’ public to display ‘British’ historical and contemporary artworks, however, it’s frequent and most ‘traditional’ audiences are often white and middleclass. I will then pose, ‘who is the ‘Britain’ within Tate Britain? And how does it contend with ‘Britain/Britishness’ that is transnational, racial, historical and colonial, as recent events like ‘Brexit’ (2016) and the ‘Windrush Scandal’ (2018) has shown it to be? By interrogating the historical, ontological and textual

framings of Tate Britain through comparing the art works and wall texts of Brunia’s ‘Dancing Scene in West Indies’ (1764-96) and Piper’s ‘Go West Young Man’ (1987) with both artworks depicting enslaved bodies and adopting Araeen’s (2010) critique of whiteness pervading cultural institutions and Hall’s questionings of heritage, nationhood, memorialisation (2008) alongside Critical Race Theory. This paper will also explore who is ‘safety’ intended for and what are they seeking safety from? Especially as ‘safety’ is employed through the discourses of surveillance culture, ‘anti-terrorism,’ immigration and citizenship to protect the white-western-neo-liberal-nation-state. And so, how might a site like Tate Britain reinforce such dominant structures through security, curatorial and interpretation? I will conclude by proposing ‘brave(r)’ spaces as both a counter-position to ‘safe(r) spaces,’ and as a praxis for art museums to address their colonial histories through the lenses of intersectionality and decoloniality. Janine Francois is a Black-Feminist Cultural Producer and Lecturer at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts. Her practices centres women/femmes of colour by establishing ‘safe(r)’ spaces as sites of resistance, disruption and co-production. Janine is a Collaborative Partnership Doctoral student researching, ‘if Tate can be a ‘safe(r) space’ to discuss race and cultural difference within a teaching and learning context,’ at Tate and University of Bedfordshire. Janine is interested in (re)production of dominance, ethics of care and the cultural politics of emotions (Ahmed, 2004) within cultural institutions. You can follow her thoughts via Instagram at: @itsjaninebtw or her blog: itsjaninebtw.com Joel Fagan- Paisley’s Empire: Representation, Collection and Display The Paisley Museum Re-imagined Project includes critical examination of the museum collections’ colonial roots and tackling questions of representations of empire, colonialism, and slavery. Throughout the 19th century Paisley was at the centre of the textile trade, with intrinsic links to the British Empire. With numerous privileged families based in Renfrewshire who profited heavily from colonial expansion, the town of Paisley became a centre for philanthropism and trophy hunting. Sir Peter Coats of J&P Coats thread maker gifted Paisley Museum to the town in 1871 and the museum soon amassed a collection from all corners of the Empire, largely gathered and donated by wealthy white men. At the centre of Paisley’s empire was the Presbyterian Church. Born in Paisley, John Park was one of the founders of the London Missionary Society, and became the head of the mission board in Scotland. A Paisley branch of the London Missionary Society was created in 1796 and soon, numerous missionaries destined for the Pacific and Africa, were inevitably taught in Paisley. Paisley’s business and missionary interests continue to be reflected in Paisley Museum’s collection. This paper will look at key collectors and collecting periods to explore a collection of around 2000 world cultures objects, and analyse the representation of colonialism and of the British Empire within a local authority collection, as well as examining ways in which the project team are attempting to begin to critically engage with histories of empire. Joel Fagan is the Research Assistant for World Cultures and Global Perspectives at Paisley Museum. Exploring a neglected collection, he is researching, collaborating and facilitating interpretation for displays within the re-imagined Paisley Museum for 2022. Critically analysing Paisley’s intrinsic links to the Empire through the museum’s objects, he hopes to reconnect the collection with source communities in order to give the collection their voices back. He is a facilitator, not an expert. Affiliation – Paisley Art Gallery and Museum (Renfrewshire Leisure) Kasia Tomasiewicz - ‘I want to say thank you to Africa’: changing representations of Empire in The Imperial War Museum, London Museums are often described as ‘rational’ Enlightenment projects, concerned as much with the order of things as with the ordering of things. In representing profoundly irrational experiences however, the Imperial War Museum (IWM) could provide a vital space for thinking about the violence that underpins imperialism. Yet, war museums feel strangely absent from conversations around the shifts in representing Empire. IWM’s remit officially, although not unproblematically, begins in 1914 and is primarily concerned with the ‘total wars’ of the twentieth century. These wars are cornerstones of British national identity. As Paul Gilroy notes however, the amplification of war narratives has often obscured a sense of coming to terms with the imperial ‘past’. Unlike ‘ethnographic’ or ‘universal’ museums, critiques of IWM come not from debates on repatriation of contested objects, but the need for an increased representation of troops from the former Empire during

these conflicts. This new focus comes with challenges as well as opportunities, and it begs the question – what are the limits of representation and the methods that underpin drives towards ‘diversity’ and ‘global citizenship’? Untangling the complex relations underlying representation, this paper uses on-going archival and ethnographic research to explore how, why, or if there has been a significant change in narrative orientation in the Museum. In doing so it situates current historical and museological scholarship alongside wider societal changes. Kasia Tomasiewicz is a final year PhD researcher at the University of Brighton and the Imperial War Museum. Her research traces the changing landscapes of Second World War memory and commemoration at the Museum’s flagship London site. She uses archival, ethnographic and oral history research methods, and is particularly interested in methodological approaches to museum spaces and the complex relations between past, present and future in conducting research on and in museums. Dr Kate McMillan – Islands of Empire: Contemporary Art and Unforgetting This paper will draw from my newly published research on artistic and curatorial practices in the global south that seek to re-dress systematically concealed histories. It will discuss new methods of thinking about decolonial strategies that forge intersections between feminism, memory work, creative practice and the Anthropocene. This includes three concepts – ‘listening with our feet’; ‘Proust in the antipodes’ and ‘the colonial sublime’. I argue that forgetting is systemic and deliberate and that creative practices can resist this in new ways. The paper will explore the uneasy relationship first nation artists have with museum spaces and provide examples of working that seek to highlight past injustices, whilst creating new methods of creative exchange. I argue that first nation artists in the global south have been highly influential on creative practices more broadly, ensuring that decolonial resistance in museum and institutional spaces has increasingly inflected curatorial and strategic representations across all forms of visual arts. I will focus on a number of female first nation artists including Julie Gough (Tebrikunna); Lisa Reihana (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Hine, Ngāi Tū); Karla Dickens (Wiradjuri); Yhonnie Scarce (Kokatha /Nukunu), Megan Cope (Quandamooka) and Yuki Kihara (Samoan/Japanese). Through an examination of their work in key exhibitions, I demonstrate how stories that unforget violent colonial histories have found themselves into museum spaces. Key exhibitions include Defying Empire: 3rd National Indigenous Triennial at the National Gallery of Australia; With Secrecy and Despatch at Campbelltown Arts Centre, New South Wales (2016) Sovereignty at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne (2016) and TARNANTHI at the Art Gallery of South Australia (2017). Emerging first nation curators such as Kimberley Moulton and Clothilde Bullen have been instrumental in creating space for decolonial strategies through their exhibition practices which seek to address the residue of empire on cultural practice, environmental degradation and female first nation knowledges. McMillan is a London based, Australian artist and academic whose written and practice-led research engages with the residue of history in the global south. Her recent monograph (2019) ‘Contemporary Art and Unforgetting: islands of Empire’, Palgrave Macmillan (https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783030172893) explores the practices of 11 first nation women artists in the global south and the forms of practice they embody to trouble colonial histories. McMillan teaches art and global politics, often in collaboration with cultural partners such as Tate, and writes and researches on decolonial methods in curatorial and artistic practices. Other research includes analysis of how museums and institutions maintain barriers to access, most recently published in commissioned work by the Freelands Foundation on Representation of Female Artist in Britain during 2018 (https://freelandsfoundation.co.uk/research/representation-of-female-artists-in-britain-2018) Her work has been exhibited in biennales and museums around the world and her latest exhibition ‘The Lost Girl’ will be presented at Somerset House in 2020. www.katemcmillan.net Affiliation: Department for Culture, Media and Creative Industries, King’s College, London Shelley Angelie Saggar - How do you solve a problem like a science museum? Arguably one of the most significant collections of medical artefacts in the world, Sir Henry Wellcome’s Historical Medical Museum was originally intended to tell the story of mankind’s approach to health and medicine. Whilst Wellcome Collection today is well known as an institution striving to connect public narratives about science, medicine, life and art through public programmes and research, the ethnographic

material in the collection, currently on long-term loan to the Science Museum, tends not to be fully considered alongside the “hard” medical stories evidenced by the objects in the collection. A joint initiative sponsored by the Science Museum and Wellcome Collection is attempting to begin difficult conversations about the history and place of such objects in a “science” institution. By starting to research sacred and secret items in the collection, Wellcome is beginning the process of making its environment more inclusive, its collections more accessible and its practice more critically reflective of its colonial history. Whilst the activist call to “decolonise the museum” has largely been directed at museums that consider themselves to have “universal” collections and curatorial approaches, science and medicine museums have mostly been neglected in public engagements with the history of colonialism. This is despite the fact that scientific museums are inextricably linked with the development of colonial ideology and served to both legitimise racialist theories and disseminate the public knowledge of such ideologies (Das and Lowe, 2019). This paper will present the approach taken during the course of this research project and critically reflect on the institutional ambitions for the project versus the decolonial method applied to cultivate a lifetime commitment to evidencing colonial stories in public science narratives. Shelley Angelie Saggar is a Research Fellow looking into culturally sensitive items in the Wellcome Historical Medical Collections. Based at the Science Museum, her research practice combines uncovering colonial entanglements contained in collections with public storytelling inside and outside of the museum. Her research interests include the representation of museum-spaces in Indigenous literature and film from North America and critically interrogating discourses of ‘healing’ in museums. shelley.saggar@sciencemuseum.ac.uk Jatinder Kailey - Re-visiting working with source communities 2019 is the bicentenary birth year of Queen Victoria, to mark this anniversary Historic Royal Palaces (HRP) has created a new exhibition at Kensington Palace. Victoria: Woman and Crown, explores the queen’s private life and her role as a monarch, mother and Empress of India. In order to present a nuanced and complex account of Victoria within the exhibition, the Public Engagement and Curatorial teams incorporated participatory practice throughout the planning and development stages. HRP worked collaboratively with members of the local South Asian community to respond creatively to the narrative, key themes and objects featured in the exhibition. It was intended from the beginning that the outcome of the project was to be embedded into the final exhibition. The content outcome contributed to diverse voices and perspectives being present in the exhibition narrative. Project consultants, Neena Sohal and Rinku Mitra recruited an intergenerational group of local South Asian community members as well as students from a range of London universities studying South Asian culture and language, to develop a series of text labels in the form of ghazals (a form of poetry popular within the Indian subcontinent and diaspora community). Over the course of six sessions, participants had the opportunity to visit the object stores at Hampton Court Palace, learn more about Queen Victoria with historian Dr Priya Atwal and create their contemporary responses to the exhibition objects with poet Jaspreet Kaur (Behind The Netra). HRP has had a history of working collaboratively with community groups, however this project enabled us to develop content for an exhibition and as a result has helped support a wider range of external voices. This approach has allowed HRP to meaningfully connect with local communities, reinforcing a key strand of HRP’s charitable mission to widen its reach amongst diverse audiences. Jaitinder Kailey is a Community Assistant Producer at Historic Royal Palaces, Kensington Palace. Sophie Campbell - Just part of the Empire story? English museums’ representations of the scale of the ‘business of slavery’. This paper will focus on the depicted scale of the ‘business of slavery’ in England’s permanent museum exhibits on Transatlantic Slavery. By the ‘business of slavery’ I mean not only direct slave trading or the ownership of enslaved people, but also connected commerce such as the mills that relied on slave-cultivated cotton. It will particularly focus on whether the memorial framework of the British Empire dominates the narrative in terms of scale, or whether there is a broader, or narrower, frame. It will explore why it may dominate, where it appears most clearly, and what the potentially limiting impact on the representations is. To do this, this paper will focus on what geographic locations are included within the museums’ narratives.

Examples include Britain itself, Jamaica and other British sugar islands, the American colonies and those beyond the British Empire such as Spanish-controlled Cuba. I will analyse the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool, M-Shed in Bristol, Wilberforce House in Hull, and galleries at the Museum of London Docklands and the National Maritime Museum in London. These permanent exhibits and galleries were largely installed for the bicentenary of the abolition of the British transatlantic slave trade in 2007. I am a PhD student at the University of Nottingham. My thesis is currently titled ‘Before and Beyond Abolition: Remembering the ‘business of slavery’ at heritage sites in England and New England’. My ‘heritage’ case studies include museums and art galleries, historic houses, cityscapes and sites specifically connected to the cotton industry. After studying History at undergraduate, I completed my MA in Art Gallery and Museum Studies at Leeds, and I am now co-supervised across Nottingham’s Geography, History and American Studies departments. My PhD research is funded by the AHRC through the Midlands3Cities Doctoral Training Partnership.

Royal Pavilion & Museum Brighton Discussion Dr Helen Mears, Keeper of World Art for Royal Pavilion & Museum and a lecturer and researcher in Museum Studies and the History of Art and Design at the University of Brighton. Helen's research interests reflect her experience of working in the museum sector for nearly two decades, as a curator, researcher and community engagement officer. For much of this time her focus has been on non-western or ‘world art’ collections, which were largely formed by British people working within a colonial context. Thinking through the implications of this for museums and society today is one of the key drivers for her research and she is especially interested in the interface(s) between 'official' heritage practices and those of diaspora communities. Judith Ricketts, Artists and visiting lecturer at the University of Brighton A member of the BME Heritage Network, Judith is an exhibiting artist, researcher and visiting lecturer, making immersive interactive works from the immaterial nature of data, the body, and the city. She views the city as a series of patterns and interdependencies, arranged between the spaces of data, spatial appearances, and the biometric aesthetics of the body. Judith builds interaction across communities and across generations for a better world. Tony Kalume, Vice Chairman of the Association of community interpreters, Lewes, and visiting lecturer at the University of Brighton A member of the BME Heritage Network, Tony has 30 years’ experience performing at various international venues. He has played with the Afro rock band from New York Antibalas, independently and with various other artists. His specialities are eclectic, ranging from creative writing, Black history, community organising to name but a few.