SINGAPORE — With calls for looted artefacts and sacred idols to be returned to the countries they came from growing louder in recent years, history and arts experts in Singapore are also urging museums here to review where and how they procured their collections.

At the same time, some experts here are also calling for these artefacts to be exhibited in a way that is "sensitive" to the context of their origins, such as by not harping on colonial narratives that could carry negative connotations.

This is especially so given the growing sensitivity around the world to historical injustices, and the greater awareness of the power structures at play when it comes to globalisation, they said.

The experts were speaking to TODAY after recent reports about groups in other countries calling for Singapore's museums to return religious idols, which they claimed were stolen or taken unethically from the original religious sites.

The most recent case was in April, when the Hindu Times reported that Indian government officers were preparing to visit Singapore soon, as part of efforts to recover 16 allegedly stolen antique idols. 

The relics were allegedly taken from the Tamil Nadu temples in the 1970s and recently traced to the Asian Civilisations Museum (ACM), the newspaper reported.

Assistant Professor Hoe Su Fern from the Singapore Management University (SMU) said that in general, any restitution of artefacts should not be the result of a self-serving diplomacy "but a genuine recognition that this would be a great step towards reparative justice and a more equitable world".

"Apart from ACM, we should also question and be more aware of how we obtained and grew our National Collection, especially the provenance of the artefacts within the collection."

She added that curators should be sensitive about how to position Singapore within Southeast Asia without overemphasising the power imbalances arising from the nation's own economic growth.

To this end, ACM has been changing the way it curates items over the last decade. 

In response to TODAY’s queries on how the museum is responding to these trends, director Kennie Ting said that it now focuses on exploring cross-cultural perspectives "rather than civilisations in silos", and that it has been spotlighting Asian craftsmanship and design, among other things. 

The museum has also made a point of collaborating with practising designers and artisans, or with communities for their recent exhibitions, he added.

“This shift represents a conscious effort on our part — already initiated some time ago — to move firmly away from older, ethnographic museological approaches established during colonial times, and to chart our own unique and contemporary Singaporean way forward,” Mr Ting added.

SHIFTING LENS

This practice of museums portraying exhibits in a way that reflects the perspectives of indigenous people, and shifting from the Western-style of portraying another culture through the lens of dominant cultural groups, is known as "decolonisation".

An academic from Nanyang Technological University (NTU) said that the purpose of doing so is to "rebalance" official narratives that may have painted colonial powers in an unduly benign light, while suppressing histories of oppression and discrimination

Assistant Professor Michelle Lim, who is from NTU's School of Art, Design and Media, added that Singapore’s national museums should be sensitive to the contexts of the artefacts on display, but not necessarily because of curatorial trends or fear of legal and diplomatic repercussions. 

“Museum exhibitions can be powerful ways of telling stories to people, taking them through visual journeys that can be very moving and affective,” she said. 

There are cultural and historical sensitivities among different groups of visitors as well, she added, noting that many visitors to Singapore's museums come from the region.

"It’s important that such works and objects, when taken out of their origin culture and displayed in a museum context, supports historical narratives that tell a truthful story about past experiences." 

On its part, Mr Ting from ACM said that the museum's current slate of permanent exhibitions looks at transnational themes such as maritime trade, faith and belief, as well as materials and design.

These are themes that present the history and art history of Asia in terms of a living and dynamic ebb and flow of people, goods, cultures, faiths and ideas, rather than in terms of static and monolithic civilisational “blocs”, he added.

"Asia is placed centrestage and we explore and present how it has impacted the world historically and today — in terms of trade, systems of belief and ideology, craft and aesthetics, and style."

REVIEWING SOURCES OF ARTEFACTS

The experts also said that Singapore's museums should proactively review the provenance of works and relics that are in its collections.

The provenance refers to the artefact's source or origin, including the history of its ownership.

This is in light of recent events surrounding claims from other countries to repatriate these artefacts. Greece, for instance, has been calling for the return of the Parthenon Sculptures from the British Museum.

The sculptures, also known as the Elgin Marbles, were removed from the Parthenon temple in Athens in the early 19th century by the British diplomat and soldier, Lord Elgin. 

The sculptures were then bought by the British government in 1816 and placed in the British Museum, which still houses them today. 

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said in March this year that the museum will not be agreeing to Greece's requests, saying that the sculptures remain a “huge asset” to Britain. 

Elsewhere, there have been Western museums that have complied with such claims. For example, France in 2021 returned a collection of bronze statues to Nigeria, known as the Benin Bronzes. The relics were looted from Nigeria by French forces in 1892.

Associate Professor Anne Raffin from the National University of Singapore said that some of these issues arose because these museums pieces could have been acquired during the colonial period, a sign of how museums played a role as part of colonialism. 

There are also collections that could have been bought by unsavoury characters or have unclear provenance, or from seemingly legitimate sources that turn out to be illegitimate later.

For instance, in 2015, Singapore returned an 11th century bronze sculpture depicting a Hindu goddess believed to have been illegally removed from India. ACM bought it in 2007 for US$650,000 (S$898,000) from a defunct New York gallery accused of an extensive antiquities-smuggling operation.

In a separate case, a religious artefact that is nearly four centuries old was said to have been taken from Nepal and was also traced to Singapore in August last year.  

ACM said at the time that the 17th-century gold-copper icon from Nepal was acquired in accordance with “established procedures”. The artefact is still exhibited in the museum today. 

Assoc Prof Raffin said that the question of how museums procure their collections lie at the heart of the museum decolonisation trend, which is about ownership, power and control. As such, museums have to make known the origins of such objects and how they were acquired.

Agreeing, Asst Prof Hoe from SMU said that undertaking provenance research will ensure that objects in Singapore's collection have been legally and ethically acquired. 

"Works of art have stories of their own, and such research will allow for new possibilities to emerge for approaching exhibitions differently, and allow audiences to encounter the arts in new ways," she added. 

Doing so is also necessary because visitors are more sensitive. 

For some avid museum goers such as Ms Jamie Quek, 23, a visit to the museum is about learning new perspectives and why the exhibits matter to the communities they came from. 

The sociology undergraduate from NUS has been frequently visiting museums since she was a teenager. It was a university class that touched on museum studies that led her to change the way she looked at certain artefacts, she said.

“I started to become more aware of how information presented is selective during the curatorial process and it may not be a holistic understanding of the communities the artefacts came from.” 

Rather than thinking of museums as "neutral disseminators of information", Ms Quek said that she now tries to keep an open mind seeing that museum descriptions may not be "entirely factual".

That is why whenever the sociology major visits a museum, she tries to dig deeper beyond what was written in the descriptions put up alongside them. 

Ms Quek suggested that museums should do more to engage with the cultures and communities that are being exhibited, so that they, too, can have a say in how they would like to be presented in museums.