Collecting Tibet

Collecting, amassing, selecting, classifying, exhibiting, curating, narrating, disseminating, contextualising, educating, reconstructing: “Collecting Tibet” is about creating and ordering knowledge, both in colonial and modern time.

This special issue “Collecting Tibet” of kunsttexte.de seeks to investigate how Tibetan art and material culture were collected in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries in the West. Both case studies exploring different museum collections, the circumstances and motivations of their acquisition and their collectors’ ambitions as well as more theoretic approaches are welcome. These will illustrate different approaches, modes and peculiarities towards collecting for instance in the military, the “scholarly” or the tourist context and might contribute to shedding light on itineraries of collections and reconstructing lost context in order to finally investigate colonialism respectively its aftermath and use of objects with regard to Tibet/the Himalayas.
The study of historical collections might, in addition, fertilise contemporary perspectives and reflections on collecting, too, and inform our understanding as academics and/or curators.

Furthermore, papers might reflect on the formation of the canon of what is considered as Tibetan art today and look at the whole range of ethnographic objects and ceremonial art and the way colonial collectors contributed to the formation of the various academic disciplines related to the research on Tibet/the Himalayas.
For the special issue “Collecting Tibet” of kunsttexte.de, we invite papers from various disciplines that explore these and related questions to appraise this hitherto neglected topic.

Issue Editor
Regina Höfer, Department of Asian and Islamic Art History, Institute of Oriental and Asian Studies, University of Bonn, Germany

Proposals for the special issue “Collecting Tibet” of the section “Transcultural Perspectives” of the E-journal on Visual and Art History kunsttexte.de, are now being accepted (http://www.kunsttexte.de/index.php?id=111&L=1).
To submit a proposal, send an abstract (200-300 words) and a brief CV (max. 1 page) to regina.hoeferuni-bonn.de.

Deadline for proposals: October 10, 2017
Information of acceptance: October 22, 2017

Articles should not exceed 6000 words (including footnotes, excluding bibliography) and 11 illustrations and will be due on January 14, 2018.

For inquiries please contact the editor: regina.hoeferuni-bonn.de