This lecture draws on Dr Emma Martin’s forthcoming monograph, The Dissident Museum: Oppositional Curating at the Tibet Museum. In one of the book’s chapters, Martin considers what might constitute a Tibetan material culture of dissent and how such a thing materialised in the Tibet Museum – a museum built by Tibetan exiles in India. For this talk, Martin will address the still little-considered intersection between Tibetan social movements and material culture (Yangzom 2014, 2016; Shakya 1993) and its scant presence in museum collections and displays (Martin 2017). She will also think about what is afforded our attention when so little academic research is directed towards this spectacular and iconic aspect of Tibetan visual and material culture. In bringing this back to the Tibet Museum, Martin will highlight how the museum purposely drew on Lhakar or ‘White Wednesday’ – a Tibetan non-violent, culture-centred mode of resistance – as its curatorial framework. In keeping with the aims of the book, she will focus on the processes of museum-making and how Lhakar enabled the project team to identify dissenting Tibetan material culture in things that might not necessarily appear Tibetan or resistant at first glance. Thus highlighting the potential for Tibetan objects to do a type of political work they are rarely asked to do in museum spaces.
Dr Emma Martin is Senior Lecturer in Museology at the University of Manchester. She has more than 25 years of experience as a curator of collections from South Asia, the Himalayas and Tibet. From 2017-2023 she was the curatorial advisor to the Tibet Museum, in Dharamshala, India and since 2024 she has been the curatorial consultant to the museum in The Dalai Lama’s Centre of Tibetan and Ancient Indian Wisdom, in Bodh Gaya, India. Her research sits at the intersection of colonialism(s), Tibetan Studies, museum activism, and materiality and moves between contemporary museum practice in Tibetan exile contexts and historical research on Tibetan materiality in British colonial archives.
Organised by Jordan Quill (Phd Candidate, The Courtauld), and supported by Professor Sussan Babaie as part of the series From the Land of Snows: The Art and Material Culture of Tibet and the Himalayas, part of the Trans-Asias Research Cluster.
