Decolonizing Collections: The Reception and Consumption of Classical Casts in Pedagogy in the British Empire

该项目旨在首次提供重要和急需的历史洞察，了解古董石膏模型的进口、传播和作用，作为教学材料和忠实再现缺失的经典作品的手段，在印度次大陆的教学收藏和视觉展示中。与现代博物馆中流离失所或“被盗”的文物没有什么不同，古典雕塑的模型，当在后殖民环境中被发现时，与帝国主义叙事有着密不可分的联系：它们的使用和展示将阐明在19世纪和20世纪初殖民/帝国文化政策的实施中，通过使用希腊和罗马雕塑，西方理想在艺术中的传播所起的作用。该项目将设在阿什莫尔博物馆的卡斯特画廊，这是英国保存最完好的博物馆之一，也是一个完全基于教学文化和收藏实践的博物馆，这些文化和实践决定了19世纪学术界将被送往国外的卡斯特。它将受益于印度古典文化接受方面的一位世界专家的跨学科监督，以及与科伦坡表演和视觉艺术大学视觉艺术学院的合作伙伴关系（斯里兰卡）。它最终将对阿什莫尔博物馆的藏品和经典课程的非殖民化倡议产生重大影响，并将一个经常被忽视的博物馆藏品类别插入当前关于殖民主义、帝国主义和民族主义的国际辩论中。

This project aims at providing for the first time an important and much-needed historical insight into the import,dissemination and role of plaster casts from the antique, as teaching materials and means of faithful representations ofabsent classical works, in pedagogic collections and visual displays of the Indian subcontinent. No different to displaced or"stolen" artefacts in modern museums, casts of classical sculpture, when found in postcolonial environments, areinextricably connected to imperialism narratives: their use and display will illuminate the role of the diffusion of the westernideal in art - through the use of Greek and Roman sculptures - in the implementation of 19th and early 20th centuriescolonial/imperial cultural policies.The project will be based in the Cast Gallery of the Ashmolean Museum, one of the finest and best preserved in the UnitedKingdom, and one that is fully grounded in both the teaching culture and collecting practice that determined the set of caststo be sent abroad in 19th c. academia. It will benefit from the interdisciplinary supervision of one of the world experts in thereception of Classical culture in India, and of the partnership with the collection of casts of the Faculty of Visual Arts of theUniversity of Performing and Visual Arts at Colombo (Sri Lanka). It will ultimately have a major impact on initiatives in thedecolonization of both the Ashmolean's collections and the Classics curriculum, and insert an often-neglected category ofmuseum objects into current international debates on colonialism, imperialism and nationalism.