Museums vow to come clean over ‘stolen’ treasures
Staff recruited to rewrite labels and acknowledge controversial origins of key colonial-era objects
BRITAIN’S leading museums are employing full-time staff to revisit their colonial-era collections in an attempt to acknowledge any controversies about their provenance.
Major institutions, including the British Museum and V&A, are working to reassess the origins of some of their key objects brought to Britain from overseas under the Empire, to provide an honest assessment for visitors.
The collections have come under increasing pressure in recent years to acknowledge “stolen” items, facing calls to return star objects to their native countries.
The British Museum, which holds the Elgin marbles and Benin bronzes, has regularly emphasised the “great public benefit” of having such items on display in the context of its world collection, and its commitment to the safe-keeping of its treasures.
But, as a new generation of visitors demand answers, the museum, along with the V&A and the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, has encouraged staff to look again at its labels.
The V&A has “strengthened its commitment to provenance research”, a spokesman said. It recently appointing a dedicated “provenance and spoliation research curator” to look into the origins of the Gilbert Collection – made up of gold and silver, enamel miniatures, gold boxes and mosaics amassed through the 20th century – and co-ordinate the museum’s re-examination of where objects came from.
The events programme of 2018 included conferences on colonial history entitled “Troubling Objects” and “Practices of Engagement with Contested Heritage Collections”.
A current exhibition about the 150th anniver-
sary of the siege and battle of Maqdala – the culmination of the British expedition to Abyssinia – was developed in “close consultation” with the Ethiopian embassy in London and an advisory group from the Ethiopian community and representatives from the Orthodox Tewahedo Church, Anglo-ethiopian society and Rastafarian community, a spokesman said.
At the British Museum, curators are incorporating new provenance research into audio guides, as well as striving for “very honest” labels.
The label on the Benin bronzes currently states they were among the “thousands of treasures taken as booty” in a “punitive expedition” in Nigeria.
The information provided alongside a controversial bark shield from New South Wales, thought to have been brought back by Captain Cook, states: “First contacts in the Pacific were often tense and violent.”
The museum also has a series of tours on objects with colonial pasts and how they entered the collection.
Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford is advertising for a research assistant to manage a labelling project to “identify and find ways to redress a range of ethical issues in the current displays”.
Paid between £32,236 and £39,609, the successful candidate will “tackle a complex problem around historical labelling and language use in the muchloved and criticised Pitt Rivers Museum”, with the aim to “dissect and dismantle some of the complex contested words, stereotypes and concepts that are present not only in museums but in society at large”. Tristram Hunt, the director of the V&A, said: “Through exhibitions, conservation work, provenance research, talks and events, the V&A is committed to exploring our own colonial history with rigour and transparency – and to building platforms for partnership and collaboration around the world.”
It follows a number of temporary exhibitions that have aimed to tackle the issue head on. The curators of the Royal Academy’s Oceania exhibition
this year
welcomed a “sea change” in how museums showcase other cultures. Indigenous communities privately blessed sacred objects before they went on display in the exhibition, with curators conducting hundreds of conversations with the many tribal communities of the Pacific Islands. The British Museum’s Aboriginal exhibition included a ban on photography in particular rooms out of respect for indigenous culture.
♦ A collection of 120 Zulu artefacts from the battle that inspired the Michael Caine film has emerged for sale for £50,000.
It includes shields and weapons used at Rorke’s Drift, where a 140-strong British garrison defied all odds to defend the mission station successfully from 4,000 Zulu warriors in 1879.
Michael Woodfield, a former council worker, was inspired to begin the collection after being taken to see the film Zulu, which was released in 1964, as a young boy.