My research interests are in the field of museums, collections, their uses and publics. The history and re-positioning of ethnographic collections and museums since the nineteenth century must be seen together with the shifts taking place across the institutional spectrum: from art museums, on the one hand, to natural history museums, on the other. These taxonomic shifts reflect changes in professional practice and public policy in the second half of the twentieth century. These institutional adjustments took place in the context of broader historical processes, including decolonization, democratisation, and digitalization, which generated new circumstances and novel questions. These included repatriation debates concerning the restitution of cultural property to rightful heirs or source communities; renovation programmes aimed at transforming historical premises into public-oriented facilities with an added-value allure equal to or exceeding that of spectacular newcomers; and the digitalization of collection records as part of the creation of virtual sites as  essential dimensions of actual sites. These and other aspects of my research have been published in Museums: A Visual Anthropology (Berg, 2012), and publications going back to my initial collection research at the National Museum of Ethnology in Lisbon, 1986-7 (Melanesian Artefacts/ Post-modernist Reflections, IICT/ Museu de Etnologia 1988).

As museums are increasingly drawn into collaborative networks aimed at promoting particular cities or regions as cultural capitals, they must re-position themselves and their collections in this new landscape. This re-positioning precipitates new forms of collaboration and my current research focuses on the work-in-progress of two Australian artists, Adam Geczy and Adam Hill, at the Museum of Contemporary Aboriginal Art Utrecht. Their joint exhibition, BOMB, will be part of the 300 year Commemoration of the Treaty of Utrecht. The 1713 Peace of Utrecht changed the world order irrevocably through the violent imperial projects of European powers, such as Great Britain in Australia. BOMB provides a postcolonial intervention in Utrecht 2013. 

What are the material practices of such collaboration – for the artists, for the curatorial and museum staff, and for the public? How does the creative process unfold through the times and spaces of global art worlds to converge at the AAMU for this 2013 commemoration? As a case study, observation and interview are combined with historical research into earlier exhibitions at the museum, as well as the artists’ trajectories into it. The case study sheds light on museum practices in globalised art worlds and, more particularly, to theorizing how contemporary art operates in the context of heritage dynamics – whereby museums must re-locate themselves in the field of cultural production. This project began in December 2012 and will run to the end of 2013.