From Art to Craft: Re-thinking Iranian material culture in British museum collections
Resource type
Conference paper (unpublished)
Creator (person)
Voigt, Friederike
Abstract
Within the last twenty years, leading museums in Western Europe and North America have acknowledged the diversity of the Muslim world to a greater degree than previously in their renovated and expanded Islamic art galleries. Often driven by perceived or habitual audience expectations, Western aesthetics (masterpieces or tribal art), concepts (chronological/dynastic orders) and categorisations (art, ethnography, decorative arts), however, still prevail in the curatorial development and interpretation of these collections worldwide. Yet an increasingly critical view of these practices has developed within the field of Islamic art history itself. The contemporary debate around the colonial legacies of museums, their social responsibility, the need for inclusion, co-curation, and racial diversity, makes the re-thinking of Islamic art collections in public institutions, which were often built in the 19th and early 20th century, or with concepts in mind developed at the time, an urgent task to ensure their continued relevance.
This paper therefore takes a case study of the Iranian collection in the National Museum of Scotland to argue for re-embedding these objects that to a large extent were collected as decorative art, into their original cultural context. I will focus on concepts of home and garden to provide an alternative interpretation that uses Iranian perspectives rather than the Western ones in which they have been presented since their acquisition by the museum.
Event title
Association for Art History Annual Conference 2023
Rights statement
In Copyright