Circumambulating
Objects
On Paradigms of Restitution of Southeast Asian Art
Circumambulating Objects: on Paradigms of Restitution of Southeast Asian Art (CO-OP) assembles individuals across the arts, culture and heritage fields to question entrenched systems of valuation, ownership, collecting and power as these are brought into relief through restitution processes today. Exploring Southeast Asian epistemologies and needs at the intersection of these processes, we ask to whom or to where ‘art’ belongs—within state-building agendas, colonial ideations, collective memories…?
The name CO-OP signals both the cooperation and co-optation of parties active in the displacement of art throughout history. As a programme, we acknowledge our own role within networks of dispersal and return ‘home’. This website comprises an exploration of pathways upon which things and people continuously travel and the waypoints at which they make historical impact. The online environment of CO-OP also seeks to envision trajectories which are nuanced and equitable.
Critical Research Pathways
Circulation & Circumambulation
Year One explores a series of historical examples of movement of sacred ‘art’. This includes instances of materials circulating across politico-cultural and temporal boundaries, operating within pilgrimage networks and transcending the material world entirely through processes like circumambulation.
Authenticity, Replication, & Ownership
Year Two explores Southeast Asian ‘art’ as theoretical object – that is, as embodying paradigms of authenticity, replication, and ownership. We examine these paradigms for ways in which they play in the construction—or deconstruction—of community. We investigate claims to ownership on a national and international level and probe where local processes of authentication are at odds with art historical, museological and market contexts.
Conservation & Display
In the final year, we examine contemporary Southeast Asian provenancing, collections management, conservation and display practices. With a close eye on objects having been restituted in recent decades, we ask how these paradigms play out in evolving economies of care and veneration.
New from the Cohort Blog
Featured Object Story
Listen to Prof. Ashley Thompson’s Inaugural Lecture at SOAS, ‘Double Realities: The Complex Lives of Ancient Khmer Statuary’, about the shrine of Neang Chek Neang Chum in Siem Reap—featured above—and its connections with questions of restitution, replication, and display. (Length: 51 min)
