Director Tristram Hunt’s talk “Colonialism and Collecting: ‘Decolonisation’ at the Victoria and Albert Museum” covers extensive ground ranging from tiger-shaped organs to Turkish culture ministers, however, one point is abundantly clear.
Hunt is firm in his conviction that, when it came to discussing lingering colonial heritage in museum institutions, history should come first.
Needless to say, this appears a blindingly obvious approach to take; after all none of these discussions can be had without historical grounding.
Even so, the guiding thread of Hunt’s presentation remains the overwhelming imperative to place the individual histories of disputed objects at the forefront.
This necessarily means not shying away from the often-intimate relationship between the provenance of museum objects with colonial violence.
For the very sake of reckoning with a deep-rooted colonial legacy – Hunt’s point was – it’s simply not enough to treat the collections of institutions like the V&A as monolithic piles of plundered loot.
