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Reflections on the International Conference on Heritage Recovery 

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In June 2025, three former CO-OP interns attended the International Conference on Recovery of Cultural Heritage, organized by Nepal Heritage Recovery Campaign in Lalitpur, Nepal. Ing Morokoth and Phuy Meychean presented panel papers on their research into the trafficking and art market networks of Khmer antiquities. Pim Fitzpayne reports here on select presentations and themes […]

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Thinking Restitution through Theatre

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CO-OP invited Lakhon Komnit Organization (LKO) to produce a theatrical response to the themes of looting, restitution and paradigms of conservation and display. LKO’s grassroots basis connected the project with a Cambodian constituency who might not ordinarily be reached by its research, nor included in the broader discourse on looting and restitution. Read below for more

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Returning to belong? Reflections from “Scenes from a Repatriation” and more

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Last month, a new play by playwright, Joel Tan, finished a four-week run at the Royal Court Theatre in London. Scenes from a Repatriation comprises a series of vignettes—first in London, then in mainland China—witnessed by, intervened in, and responding to a statue of the bodhisattva Guanyin, an imagined object of the British Museum’s collection,

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Understanding the locale, or what’s restitution actually for?

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In December 2024, I returned to Jakarta and visited the Repatriasi (Repatriation) exhibition at the National Museum of Indonesia. This temporary exhibition is part of the museum’s highly anticipated reopening after the September 2023 fire which centered on the theme “Reimagining Cultural Inheritances.” It follows previous successful exhibitions on repatriated materials to Indonesia albeit in

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Citing the consequences of commercially salvaged artefacts

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The cohort’s visit in July 2024 to the Marine Heritage Gallery, a gallery managed by the Ministry of Marine Affairs and Fisheries in Jakarta, sparked conversation about the complexities surrounding the display. The Gallery features over three thousand commercially salvaged artefacts, recovered from the ninth-century Belitung, the tenth-century Cirebon, and the twelfth-century Pulau Buaya shipwreck.

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Getting the joke. Difficult pasts and difficult sites of learning in Thailand and beyond

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To me, as an Indonesianist, or ‘Island Southeast Asianist’ as Panggah Ardiyansyah, Zainab Tahir and I would call ourselves initially in the CO-OP context, our first group visit and traveling seminar, to Thailand in January 2024, was full of unsettling encounters, the kind of encounters that confront us with a joke others find extremely funny,

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‘The Tragedy of Phanom Rung’ from 1971 by Hiram Woodward, under the pseudonym D.W. Ward

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In reflecting on Phanom Rung with Soumya James, we sought permission from Hiram Woodward to post this piece published in 1971 in the Bangkok Standard Magazine, which he kindly gave along with an accompanying note. Writing not long after the looting occurred, his commentary accents the immediate effects of such dislocations and destructions on cultural

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