The Collector's Desire: an investigation into the relationship between the collection, the collector and the collected

This Fellowship will create the opportunity to experience and understand the collections at the Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Cambridge, in a new light. On the basis of research into the collections and their histories, a series of temporary installations and will be produced for the museum that will reflect critically on some of the subtexts of the Museum's history, ranging over varied past and present interests in objects in the collections, the nature of the institution, the design of displays, and their architectural contexts, as well as the deeper ideological and political assumptions behind them. The interventions may include rewriting signage and interpretive texts, the redisplay of objects, new juxtapositions, the inclusion of new material, like contemporary artworks, into the museum context. Some interventions will be experienced digitally, others within the physical context of the building and the present displays. Both subtle and minimal, and more ambitious in scope, interventions will attempt to alter the experience of the museum as a whole, or propose ways in which it might be radically altered.

An exhibition with invited artists who are similarly concerned with anthropology and the display of artefacts from non-Western cultures will also take place and again the aim is to invite audiences to question assumptions behind and within these types of collections and their display in the present day. The concept behind the interventions and the exhibition is to invite audiences and other stakeholders in the museum (curators, students and teachers in related disciplines) to reflect on their relationship with the material and to consider ourselves in relation to the act of collecting and display. Rather than judging collectors from a previous age for their imperialist ambitions, I am more interested in seeing similarities in how we acquire curios from our own travels today and how we make sense of our experiences with other cultures.

Informed by a sustained period of research into this museum's history, into debates about collecting and collections, and wide-ranging evaluation of contemporary artistic interventions in museums, these interventions and the exhibition will aim to highlight the various tensions within the collection's display. While it is widely presumed that ethnographic collections are made up essentially of imperial loot, in fact the objects in collections today reached institutions in diverse ways, some were legitimately bought, some received by collectors as gifts, or were bartered or traded, and a considerable amount of material was in fact produced for collectors or researchers, in effect commissioned in the field. Some were forged or faked by Europeans, some to be sure was stolen or seized during armed conflict. The variety of stories behind these objects are often obscured, variously by the rationalities of classificatory displays, and sometimes by overwhelming political or religious perspectives. The telling of their stories is complex; this series of exhibitions, and associated outcomes, such as conference talks, will take on the nuances of the collection, the history of their display, and attempt to draw out the sometimes quirky and haphazard reason for their coming to be collected and seen.

The exhibition series will culminate in making a 'wunderkammer', a cabinet of curiosities, as a mobile museum in miniature. The wunderkammer will take ideas honed by my work with the museum into a wider context, reflecting on the relationship between the collector and the collected in the contemporary context. It will explore a wider idea of collections and their display taking insights gleaned from working with artists and curators from other cultures with collections and artefacts from the past into the present with our contemporary context of global travel and collections of foreign curios. This wunderkammer will be exhibited in contemporary art galleries.