'Museums and Restitution' with Dr Jacques Schuhmacher at the Centre for Museum Cultures, Birkbeck

This online talk took place online on Monday 5 July 2021 at Birkbeck's Centre for Museum Cultures. Speaker: Dr Jacques Schuhmacher (Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Provenance and Spoliation Curator at the Victoria & Albert Museum) Chair: Dr Sarah Thomas (Director, Centre for Museum Cultures, Senior Lecturer, Museum Cultures and History of Art, Birkbeck College, University of London) Countless museums hold objects in their collections that their very own codes of ethics would bar them from acquiring today. The most striking examples of this glaring discrepancy are objects captured during military campaigns outside Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries. While museums historically considered the acquisition of these objects legal and unproblematic, it would now be unthinkable to set about acquiring objects that, for example, were looted during recent conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan or Syria. This remarkable incongruity lies at the heart of the restitution debate which has robustly challenged traditional certainties and opened up a vital and complex debate about the nature and role of museums and the morality of their collections. Museums are being confronted with increasing calls not only to acknowledge and condemn this violent past, but also to take visible actions to redress this dark legacy. This includes the morally and legally complex issues of the restitution and repatriation of such objects to their countries of origin. This talk will address these issues by exploring how one of the UK’s major museums – the Victoria & Albert Museum – has dealt with restitution cases, ranging from Nazi-looted art to Colonial-era artefacts. Bio: Dr Jacques Schuhmacher is the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Provenance and Spoliation Curator at the Victoria & Albert Museum. He is the co-curator of “Concealed Histories: Uncovering the Story of Nazi Looting”, the first special provenance display by a UK museum, and the convenor of the Provenance and Spoliation Research Seminar Series at the V&A. He is a member of the National Museum Directors’ Council (NMDC) Spoliation Working Group which coordinates the provenance research efforts of the UK’s national museums in this area. He holds a DPhil in History from the University of Oxford.