Description
Travelling exhibitions have found favour with many European museums as part of their effort to make their collections accessible to a wider audience. ‘India and the World: A History in Nine Stories’ was a collaborative project between the British Museum and two museums in India. Another such exhibition, Tate Britain’s ‘Artist and Empire’, travelled from London to Singapore. Both exhibitions used objects from the BM’s and Tate’s collections to craft a narrative on colonial history within global, cosmopolitan frames. Pitching history at a global level enabled them to present the empire as an interconnected world, within which the circulation of objects was to be appreciated. The paper argues that such a feel-good framing, which sidesteps the imperial origins of the objects on display, typifies the invisibility of imperialism in the public domain. By drawing on competing curatorial narratives on colonialism, it highlights the dynamic and non-linear ways through which the connected world is continually built and dismantled in museum spaces. In a world where ‘encyclopaedic’ museums hold sway as the custodians of global history, Vik Kanwar’s evocative phrase is a timely reminder of the fragment’s potential to redefine the whole.
