CfP: Workshop on Museum Charges: Curating Spiritual Presences

In recent years, museum and religious scholars have focused on residues and traces of museum collecting practices in colonial and postcolonial settings (Bodenstein, Otoiu, von Oswald and Seiderer 2024; Samuel and Sattler 2022). Religious artefacts, or spiritually charged artefacts (Buggeln, Paine and Plate 2017; Paine 2013; Stengs 2014) more than other museum things elicit the problematic aspect of colonialism and its duress (Stoler 2016).

This workshop provides a reflexive, curatorial space for scholars, curators and heritage activists who have addressed spiritually charged artefacts in colonial and postcolonial museum collections. It offers a platform for sharing ongoing curatorial projects and exchanging ideas, knowledge and doubts related to curatorial practice with religious artefacts, letting participants imagine the latter otherwise. The collective debate will result in a blog issue proposal targeting Boasblog as a venue.

The workshop consists of three sessions distributed within three days, on the 23rd, 24th and 30th of October. It is hybrid, both online and at the Department of Asian Studies, Palacký University Olomouc, and it is linked to the MSCA-CZ project Processual Decay Paradigm of Dr Valentina Gamberi. The first two sessions will be hosted by the Department’s research cluster “Anthropology Advancements”. In the first session, participants will provide the background to their research, and past and ongoing curatorial projects in line with the workshop’s focus. In the second session, participants will work in two groups, proposing a curatorial model project based on inputs developed during the debate stimulated at the end of the first session. Each curatorial proposal is further collectively discussed. Each session will take place in the afternoon, from 2 to 6 pm CET on the 23rd and 24th of October and from 2 pm to 4 pm CET on the 30th of October, to allow online presenters from Asia and elsewhere to fully contribute to the group discussion. The third session will be entirely online. The aim of this final session is to finalise the proposal for the blog debate to submit to Boasblog.

Funding—from Dr Valentina Gamberi’s research project—will cover accommodation, and transport up to 120 € in total for each in-person participant not already based in Olomouc. Meals—two coffee breaks, a collective dinner and lunch—will be offered to all participants. In-person participants will be a maximum of five people. Participants joining online can be up to five people.

We accept proposals from independent curators, anthropologists, religious and area scholars (especially Asian scholars), museum curators and heritage practitioners/activists that might preferably but not exclusively cover:
1. Reconsideration of colonial collections;
2. Missionary collections;
3. Current/upcoming exhibitions on religious communities;
4. Forms of collaborations between ritual specialists and museums

Deadlines

• Submit to valentina.gamberi[at]upol.cz an abstract of your intervention (100-300 words) and a bio (no more than 100 words) no later than the 26th of May;
• The selected abstracts will be announced by the 10th of June;
• Selected participants will precirculate longer abstracts/pitches/blog drafts (800-2,000 words) to ensure deeper engagement within the group no later than the 9th of October.

More information at Research Clusters: Department of Asian Studies.