'The term Camping and Tramping is inspired by a lesser known 19th century document compiled by a British officer describing the field work and travails of his time with the colonial office in Malaya. Documents such as these, along with colonial institutions, sought to fill a void in terms of Orientalist knowledge available for a colonist or itinerant audience interested in the region. Aggregating such texts which make up the colonial archive, this exhibition traces the rise of the Museum in British Malaya not just as an indicator of power over what was gazed upon as the exotic but by acknowledging that the very advent of the Museum resulted in a staging ground for a project of accumulation and the ordering of knowledge.Mobilizing artefacts from the Raffles Museum and Library (established 1874) and the University Art Museum, Malaya (established 1955), the exhibition offers the question of the Museum in Malaya as evolving propositions expressed through shifting concepts of colonial knowledge, its responses to emerging contingencies of colonial politics and eventual decolonisation, and changing regard for its publics and their aspirations. Collecting, documenting, ordering, preserving and displaying - functions declared and sustained - are tasks made complex by such contexts. Birth, transformation and end of institutions render collections and documents as dynamic sets of archives that are mobile and regenerative, opened to newer meanings and claims.
The exhibition is divided into the following sections:
• The Museum as Idea
• Shifts - Other and Self
• Accumulations - Object, Order, Wonder
As reminders of how individuals in the region have laid claim to the colonial archive, the gallery also sites the practices of two post-colonial figures, Mohammad Din Mohammad and Dr. Ivan Polunin. Mohammad Din was a Singapore artist, traditional healer and collector who held that his works contained talismanic potentials. Arriving in Malaya from England in 1948, Dr. Polunin taught Social Medicine at the then University of Malaya. In an adventurous career that began with the filmic documentation of tropical diseases, Dr. Polunin's ethnographies grew to encompass hundreds of hours of film footage on Malaya's eclectic sociocultural practices and its rich biodiversity.' -from museum's website.
Onsite
English
curatorial practice,  museum studies,  archive,  colonialism,  nationalism,  history,  group exhibition
2011
133
9789810878672
2
catalogue
A University Museum: Contexts and Practice - Ahmad MASHADI
Camping and Tramping Through the Colonial Archive: The Museum in Malaya - Shabbir Hussain MUSTAFA
Themes on Singapore Museology: Selections from the Archive
Of Birds and Beasties: A Lost Transcript from the Raffles Museum - Fiona TAN
Account of a Collecting Trip in the Malayan Juggles (circa. 1900s) - Janice LOO
A Letter from my Friend William Willets - Eddie KOH
A Diary of the Archiver - Christina CHUA
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