Let’s Talk Labels: A Conversation around the Pitt Rivers Museum’s Labelling Matters project Part 1
Over the last two years, the Labelling Matters project at the Pitt Rivers Museum has begun to tackle the problematic language of our labels. However, what if one of the primary issues stems from the very process of how we perceive, create and display labels in the Museum?
Reclaiming the Uncanny
Join Labelling Matters researcher Marenka Thompson-Odlum, artists Eiko Soga, Royce Ng and anthropologists Daisy Bisenieks as they discuss a multi-media and multi-sensory approach to museum interpretation and the unexpected and uncanny results of their own practices. How can these approaches work within a space such as the Pitt Rivers Museum?
https://www.youtube.com/embed/IoAPHVZMJnU
Speakers:
Marenka Thompson-Odlum is a Research Associate at the Pitt Rivers Museums and a doctoral candidate at the University of Glasgow. Her doctoral research explores Glasgow’s role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade through the material culture house at Glasgow Museums. At the Pitt Rivers Museum, she is the researcher on the Labelling Matters project, which investigates the problematic use of language within the museum spaces and ways of decolonisation through re-imagining the definition of a label.
Royce Ng
Royce is an artist currently based in Hong Kong working in digital media and performance who deals with the intersections of modern Asian history, trans-national trade, drugs, technology and aesthetics who works with the anthropologist Daisy Bisenieks in the collective Zheng Mahler. Since 2015 he has been working on The Opium Museum, a series of performances which look at the role of opium and the development of the modern Asian state. From 2013-2016 he was artist-in-residence at the Johann Jacobs Museum in Zurich with Bisenieks where they produced the exhibitions on the economic relationship between Africa and Asia A Season in Shell (2014) and Mutual Aid (2016).
Eiko Soga
Eiko is a Japanese artist-researcher currently reading for her DPhil at The Ruskin School of Art. Her doctoral project combines video, poetry and ethnography. Currently she is doing fieldwork with an ethnic group in Japan called the Ainu. Her research involves intangible, ephemeral and emotional communication with locals which are valuable and personal. By exploring how art can embody felt knowledge she moves away from the social and educational forms imposed by colonial and imperialistic norms. The heart of her work is cultivating a conversation about reforestation and deconolonisation for societies that have been shaped by urban-capitalism-centric developments.
Resources related to this webinar (listening/ watching beforehand is best):
Pitt Rivers Museum
Labelling Matters project summary and podcasts
Eiko Soga
Royce Ng
Empire of Opium video essay commissioned by the Pitt Rivers Museum
Opium Museum Trilogy
Royce Ng and Daisy Bisenieks (Zheng Mahler collective)
http://johannjacobs.com/en/formate/royce-ng-daisy-bisenieks-a-season-in-shell/
