Abstract
Collecting Dilemmas: What to Collect, Who to Collect with and How to Represent Tibet in the 21st CenturyTibet is many things to many people. It is a place that continues to be understood as a mythical, traditional world, inhabited by spiritual, happy people: the Dalai Lama epitomizing this view. To Tibetans-in-exile it has become a longed-for homeland, and a focus for political and environmental campaigns. To China, it is part of the motherland, somewhere ripe for development and tourism, with a culture that is destined to be incorporated into the Chinese mainstream. In the museum context, Tibet, as Clare Harris notes, continues to be, "timeless", so it is, "nameless" (Harris 1999: 17). Tibet may well be timeless in museum representations, but more than this it is resolutely situated in a distinctly pre 1959 paradigm. To paraphrase Donald Lopez Jr, Tibet has become a prisoner of Shangri-la. How can a museum like National Museums Liverpool, which has one of the most significant collections of Tibetan material culture in Europe and North America rethink this museological prison? Taking a recently conceived collecting programme entitled, ‘Tibetan Realities: Life and Art in the 21st Century’ as its starting point, this presentation and poster will offer the following questions for consideration. Where should a museum collect from when a country no longer exists? Who, from the many competing and conflicting parties, should the museum collect with or from? Furthermore, is authenticity still a valid marker for the commissioning and collecting process? What should be collected in order to reflect the cultural and political changes Tibet has witnessed, processed and undergone over the past 50 years? Is it time to collect beyond the ethnographic? Do the terms ‘art’ and ‘ethnography’ have a place in the 21st century or should we instead be locating collections in a ‘third space’?
Original language | English |
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Publication status | Published - Jun 2015 |
Event | The Herrenhausen Symposium, Repositioning Ethnological Museums in the 21st Century - Herrenhausen Palace, Hanover Duration: 21 Jun 2015 → 23 Jun 2015 |
Conference
Conference | The Herrenhausen Symposium, Repositioning Ethnological Museums in the 21st Century |
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City | Herrenhausen Palace, Hanover |
Period | 21/06/15 → 23/06/15 |
Keywords
- Tibet
- Collecting
- Museum Ethnography
- Contemporary Art