SSN Islamic Art and Culture - Specialist Support Scheme

SSN Islamic Art and Material Culture  has just launched the third and final year of its Specialist Support Scheme. This is open to any museum in the UK that has an Islamic Art and Material Culture collection. The specialist support scheme aims to provide regional museums with a toolkit to help them unlock the potential of their collections of Islamic Art & Material Culture (IAMC) and use them to engage with new and diverse audiences.

Museums can apply for up to £5075 of support. The closing date for all applications is 7th August 2017. For information on Year 1 and 2 of the Support Scheme please see:

Year 1 Overview

Year 2 Overview

This is the final year of this scheme under current funding and so we would encourage all interested parties to apply, including those who have not been successful in previous rounds.

From Malacca to Manchester – Curating Islamic Collections Worldwide 23-24 Feb 2017

Along with Emma Martin and several other MEG members, I attended this conference at the Manchester Museum last week, organised by Jenny Norton-Wright, with help from curator Stephen Welsh.  With 13 speakers on the Thursday and 15 on the Friday each limited to 20 minutes it was an amazing feat of international coverage through a series of succinct and striking visual presentations.  Abstracts are available in the conference booklet we each received on our arrival.

Jenny Norton-Wright, conference organiser, with keynote speaker Dr Stefan Weber

Conference brochure

The keynote address by Dr Stefan Weber,  Director of the Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin, highlighted the current political imperatives for understanding Islam better and a variety of ways this has been attempted in Berlin, including an interactive trail called ‘Objects in Transfer’ and the use of local Syrian and Iraqi guides speaking in Arabic. One session looked at the ‘Birmingham Qur’an' in depth from different viewpoints. The big new permanent galleries at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and the Louvre in Paris, were mentioned and critiqued by several speakers, and three speakers, including Venetia Porter, gave us a good idea of what the new Albukhary Foundation galleries of the Islamic World will look like at the British Museum, when they open in 2018.  The talks from curators from Be’erSheva in Israel, the Mardajni Foundation in Moscow, the King Adbulaziz Centerfor World Studies in Saudi Arabia and a new Bangsamora gallery at the National Museum of the Philippines, contributed to our greater awareness of the huge variety of Islamic displays and cultures worldwide and current new international developments. 

It was such a rewarding and heady experience that there was talk of a forthcoming publication, perhaps a selection of just some of the papers. The conference was part of the John Ellerman funded initiative between several Manchester museums to prepare for a new South Asia gallery, in an extension at the Manchester Museum, that will open in 2018. A separate community engagement workshop/seminar is planned for mid-summer 2017.

Antonia Lovelace,

MEG Chair and Curator of World Cultures at Leeds City Museum 

Booking now open: From Malacca to Manchester: Curating Islamic Collections Worldwide

Registration for the upcoming conference From Malacca to Manchester: Curating Islamic Collections Worldwide (Manchester Museum, UK, 22-24 February 2017) is now open. 

 

For more information and to book please follow this link: http://www.whitworth.manchester.ac.uk/whats-on/events/malaccatomanchester/.

 

Attendance will be charged at £20 per day for the two days of the full conference programme (£10 per day for students).

 

The workshops and visits are free but may only be attended by paying conference attendees, with the exception of the SSN workshop which anyone can attend (preferential booking will be given to UK museum professionals engaged with Islamic art and material culture).

 

Enquiries should be sent to: malaccatomanchester@gmail.com.

 

Call for Papers - International Conference From Malacca to Manchester

From Malacca to Manchester: Curating Islamic Collections Worldwide
23-24th February, 2017
Proposal deadline: Sunday, 25th September 2016 

Proposals for papers are welcome for the two day conference From Malacca to Manchester: Curating Islamic Collections Worldwide, to be held at Manchester Museum on the 23rd and 24th February, 2017. The conference is part of a wider project to catalogue and research collections of Islamic art and material culture across the Manchester Museums and Galleries Partnership (MMGP), and is supported by the John Ellerman Foundation.
In the UK there is a need to better understand the rich and complex traditions of the Islamic world. A 2010 YouGov survey commissioned by the Exploring Islam Foundation revealed that the British public know relatively little about Islam and tend to problematise it as a consequence of exposure to negative media stereotypes. In an attempt to counteract this, UK museums and galleries are using collections of Islamic art and material culture to increase understanding and challenge misconceptions. In Manchester specifically, work on the Islamic collections will inform an exciting series of events and exhibitions in 2017 to mark UK-India Year of Culture, and a permanent South Asia gallery due to open at Manchester Museum in 2020.

Concurrently, across the UK and Europe high-profile museums such as the Louvre, the British Museum, and the Museum of Islamic Art, Berlin, have embarked upon or completed major re-installations of important Islamic art collections. At the same time, smaller and regional museums are developing new ways to work with existing collections. The role of the curator is changing, and previously underrepresented voices are increasingly given space to express personal responses to material cultures. All such projects represent critical opportunities to present the complexity of Islamic art in innovative new ways, reach out to new audiences and utilise the richness of Islamic material culture to promote social cohesion and understanding.

This conference will explore and appraise current and developing practices in the curating of museum collections of Islamic art and material culture around the world, in Europe and in the UK. A keynote address by Dr Stefan Weber, Director of the Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin, will be complemented by a series of presentations, panel discussions, practical workshops, and visits to collections in Manchester including the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester Museum, The John Rylands Library (Special Collections), and Manchester Art Gallery. The conference’s aim is to offer a vibrant and challenging perspective on the field, review ongoing projects and public and scholarly engagement, and explore professionals’ aspirations for the future developments of collections of Islamic art and material culture.
Original proposals are welcome from British, European, and international museum professionals, rising and established academic scholars, and graduate students. Submissions are invited on topics including, but not limited to:

- Recent and continuing developments in the organisation and display of museum collections of Islamic art and material culture.
- The conceptual understanding of these collections (both ‘Islamic’ and ‘art’ as concepts).
- The representation of faith in the museum.
- Presenting cultural complexity engagingly.
- Islam in Europe: in the museum.
- How museum education and volunteer programmes are engaging with this field.

- Outreach and education involving both Muslim and non-Muslim groups.

- Particular challenges faced by non-specialists working with these collections.

- Addressing the longstanding scholarly exclusion of certain regions from the traditional consideration of ‘Islamic world’ (i.e. parts of South and South-East Asia).

- Migration of artistic techniques and transregional interconnection between cultures.

- Approaches to the museum presentation of Islamic artistic traditions alongside those of non-Islamic cultures which are related temporally, geographically, or stylistically.

Guidelines for paper proposals:

Papers will be 20 minutes in length with an additional 10 minutes for questions. Proposals for presentations or panels of up to four participants should be emailed to Jenny Norton-Wright and Stephen Terence Welsh by 25th September 2016, using the following email address: malaccatomanchester@gmail.com.

Proposals should include the presenter’s name, position and institutional affiliation, the paper’s title, an abstract of up to 250 words, a biography of up to 200 words (written in the third person), and a contact email address. Panel proposals should include the above for each speaker, plus a paragraph of up to 250 words describing the panel’s rationale. Informal enquiries in advance of this deadline are welcome. 

MEG Conference Review: Faith and Community: Interpreting Beliefs in the Modern Museum

Stephen Welsh and Nick Merriman welcomed us to the Kanaris lecture theatre at the Manchester Museum, where MEG last met for an AGM and conference in 2009. Manchester’s ties with MEG go back to our early years and the input and support of both Frank Willett and George Bankes.  We were delighted that Catherine, George’s widow, had made time to attend this year’s conference with us, and the special MEG 40^th birthday cake incorporated one of the Moche pots George worked on into the digitally printed icing. Since 2009 the new main entrance at Manchester Museum has come into its own and the curators have been working across departments and across the University on the new Life gallery and a lively exhibition programme.  Now the museum will expand again using a special government grant of £5 million for the development of a new South Asia gallery in partnership with the British Museum.   

 

 

 

Session 1 of the conference had a strong Asian bias with a paper from Frederike Voigt and Rosanna Nicholson on the Maharaja Duleep Singh’s collection at NMS and an outreach project to involve a Glasgow Gurdwara in this and in visits to CastleMenzies in Perthshire where Duleep Singh first lived in the UK.  The links are celebrated in a new work by the Singh sisters (Amrit and Rabindra), the well-known UK Sikh artists who are twins.  This was a highlight of the Indian Encounters exhibition from Nov 2014 to March 2015 at NMS.  Then Ruth Garde took us behind the scenes at the Wellcome’s recent ‘Tibet’s Secret Temple’ exhibition in London, discussing the visioning of the exhibition, its structure and the complimentary role of film and exhibits.  Emma Martin posed the dilemma of how to communicate the key non-religious sides of Tibetan culture, the gambling and drunkenness, and the variety of contemporary art,  to stop the viewer responding to Tibet as an ‘out of time’ Shangri-La.

 

In Session 2 Marek Romaniszyn discussed a major contemporary collecting project on the music scene at Leeds Festival, undertaken over several years and a new community partnership exhibition, ‘Leeds Queer Stories’. Chris Wood, curator of the Ickeny collection, shared his thoughts on the topic of faith in museums so far, and Caroline van Santen talked to us about the options for improving local and visitor understanding of the role of religion and belief in the Zeeuws museum in Middelburg which is situated in a former Abbey.  We gained some great insights into the history of Zeeland,  as part of the Netherlands.
Session 3 was dominated by Death. Lisa Graves talked about the recent Bristol exhibition: ‘death:  the human experience’, it’s development and the reactions from visitors to this and a smaller display which reconstructed one of the rooms at the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland. Campbell Price presented the detail of Ancient Egyptian beliefs about death and animal mummies,  and their wrappings as shown in the Manchester exhibition which had just closed. Bryan Sitch took us through the lively debate that occurred when Manchester borrowed back the local Lindow man peat-bog burial from the British Museum for exhibition in Manchester (April 2008 – April 2009). 

That evening many of us had a drink at the nearby Kro bar before moving on to a Chinese meal at ‘The Red Chilli’, also on Oxford Road.

On Tuesday Session 4 was devoted to Australia. Gaye Sculthorpe contrasted the development and realisation of the ‘IndigenousAustralia – enduring civilisation’ exhibition at the British Museum with its Australian counterpart ‘Encounters’ at the NationalMuseum of Australia. A core group of British Museum exhibits travelled to Canberra. Both exhibitions were part of a broader collaborative project between the National Museum of Australia, the British Museum, the Australian National University and a range of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities across Australia. The exhibitions were the climax of years of research and community engagement, and the two catalogues and more than 10 short films are a benchmark in this continuing history.  Rachel Murphy then discussed some of the findings of her PhD research on attitudes to Aborigine art in terms of its needing a spiritual audience.

After the AGM we had six brief Work in Progress sessions. Sushma Jansari, Project Curator of the Asian Ethnographic Collections at the British Museum was too ill to attend so Stephen Welsh read out her paper on South Asian items with strong Manchester links at the BM. The colourful labels for export cloth were particularly stunning.  Klas Grinell, Curator of Contemporary Global Issues at the national Museum of World Cultures in Gotenburg told us of his initial findings on how Islam was dealt with in Museums in Europe and the UK. Katy Barrett and colleagues from the National Maritime Museum looked at the issues of Christianity in the Pacific in their shortlisting of items for a new gallery. Inbal Livne described the success of a recent work on bringing the Sudanese collections to life at Powell-Cotton museum, using community input from London. Then Adam Jaffer and Rebecca Bridgman talked about the new Faith in Birmingham gallery. Rebecca also put out an advert for MEG member involvement in the new Islamic SSN. Andy Mills described the early stages of work on a major AHRC funded backcloth project led by the Centre for Textile Conservation & Technical Art History at the University of Glasgow and Kew. The project will examine the collections at The Hunterian Museum, The Royal Botanic Gardens Kew and the Smithsonian Institution, using stylistic analysis, ethno-history and the history of collections, and cutting edge methods of scientific analysis and conservation. Finally after a short tea break we ended the day with a consultation session by the National Maritime Museum on the issues they hope to cover in their new Pacific gallery.

Antonia Lovelace

MEG Chair & Curator of World Cultures Leeds Museums and Galleries     

 

 

Subject Specialist Network Islamic Art and Material Culture: Islamic Ceramics Study Day

 

Wednesday 25th November 2015

 

Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

 

Free to all, with a great selection of expert speakers (including Oliver Watson) and also a range of handling sessions.  To book a place please email. Please note that numbers are limited to approx 20, on a first come first served basis. The day is FREE of charge for SSN members and includes lunch. For details and a full programme please visit the website.

Islamic Art and Material Culture Network Specialist Support Scheme

Building on from a mapping programme the Islamic Art & Material Culture Subject Specialist Network (SSN).  completed last year, the SSN are offering a specialist support scheme aims to provide regional museums with a toolkit to help them unlock the potential of their collections of Islamic Art and Material Culture and use them to engage with new and diverse audiences. It will provide flexible, specialist and practical support through a scalable programme that can be tailored to the needs of the individual institutions. At least one tangible output, such as a new display, knowledge sharing or outreach event should result from that specialist support.
Details about the Specialist Support Scheme and how to apply can be found via the SSN website

The deadline has been extended to receive applications for our Specialist Support Scheme. The deadline is 5pm on Friday 18th September, 2015.