Camping and Tramping Through the Colonial Archive: The Museum in Malaya

A project which stretches over the course of two years (2011-2013), and drawing on a series of smaller curatorial projects undertaken at the NUS Museum, Camping and Tramping Through the Colonial Archive: The Museum in Malaya, brings together varied objects, from natural history to ethnographic to films to modern paintings and contemporary artworks.

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The term Camping and Tramping is inspired by a lesser known 19th century document compiled by a British officer describing the field work and travails of his time with the colonial office in Malaya. This exhibition traces the rise of the Museum in British Malaya not just as an indicator of power over what was gazed upon as the exotic but by acknowledging that the very advent of the Museum resulted in a staging ground for a project of accumulation and the ordering of knowledge. Writings and artefacts have been mobilized from the Raffles Museum of Biodiversity Research (NUS), Asian Civilizations Museum, National Museum of Singapore, National Library Board Singapore, Singapore Press Holdings, Singapore National Archives, NUS Museum, and the Ivan Polunin and Mohammad Din Mohammad collections.

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A short quote from the essay: “Camping and Tramping through the Colonial Archive was conceived not simply as an exhibition of objects from two colonial collections, namely the Raffles Museum and the University of Malaya Museum, but as discursive space, which enables a series of discussions to emerge. Reconsidering not just the museum, but a series of institutions and structures in which the lives of its people were (and continue to be) enmeshed – forming a sort of a grid – as a series of social memories brought together (or alluded to, at least) within the museological space; as a coherent diffusion of power, knowledge and identity underpinned by the multifarious habitations of a modernity we refer to as “Singapore”. The museological space, including the texts and objects, have been dealt with as a set of complex “zones”, which may be said to be deployed and differentiated. Whilst the specificities of such a project do not mean to be superimposed with positivistic renderings of the historical document or monument, but rather, generate modes of seeing which render mythical books of history, wonder and modes of individual recordings (such as the inclusion of two figures such as Ivan Polunin and Mohammad Din Mohammad) translate particular times and places into a dense system of practices.”

For a fuller version, see: Shabbir Hussain Mustafa, “Camping and Tramping Through the Colonial Archive” in Camping and Tramping Through the Colonial Archive: The Museum in Malaya, Singapore, NUS Museum, 2011.

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