Repatriating the Object with No Shadow: Along, Against, Within, and Through

Repatriating the Object with No Shadow: Along, Against, Within, and Through (a video, and text/image artwork by Erika Tan, 2013/2024), co-ops the encyclopaedic trope of indexing (an A to Z, but not in that order) to reproduce a series of encounters with various ‘Malayan’ museumised objects, which in turn objectify the ‘Malayan’ museum as a key site in (de)colonial imaginings and regimes of control. Methods of revising, revisiting, reuse, and re-enactment engage with the ‘object with no shadow’ (that which is unseen, lost, forgotten, unilluminated) to reference untold numbers of Southeast Asian artefacts (dis)located in British museums. For this special issue, the work itself is revised, revisited, and re-enacted as well: by Emma Efkeman, in a textual dialogue interrogating the disciplinary tools of decoloniality; and by the artist Erika Tan, in the form of a reconfiguration of the original work. Responding to Tan’s proposition, ‘A Conversation between Disciplinary Boundaries’ curates experiences of working and knowing within and without the museum to imagine a future for art’s history. In both pieces, the materiality of the decolonial museum is questioned; it is imagined not so much as a museum stripped of objects, but as an idea stripped of meaning. What would it take to return the museum… back to where it came from?