Identity Without Borders

Ahead of Refugee Week in June 2017 the Pitt Rivers Museum and the Joint Museums Outreach Team undertook numerous community and public engagement events connecting with people from refugee communities. It is a series of activities geared at transforming the museum into a platform for the voices of people who are refugees, many of whom are locally based. The run of events culminated in a free public evening event called Identity Without Borders. 

Here is a taste of some of the events and activities:

Family Day craft activity

Ahead of the numerous community events taking place at the Pitt Rivers Museum training was arranged for Pitt Rivers staff around supporting refugee and asylum seekers and understanding their experiences. It was led by our partners Asylum Welcome, one of the charities and organisations that support refugees in Oxford. The training offered a brilliant opportunity to learn a bit more about the experiences of refugees within our communities and also to think about how the museums are placed to support local refugee and asylum seeking communities to engage in new ways with the collections.

The Museum and Joint Museums Outreach team ran three family days for Oxfordshire's Syrian community and people who access Refugee Resource services. The families used the museum spaces and spent time in the galleries.

BK.LUWO crocheting

The international women's group, BK.LUWO, 'took over' the balcony, working on their current craft projects and chatting to visitors. BK.LUWO is a women's empowerment group based in East Oxford Community centre. They come together twice a week to offer peer support, share skills and just be. We invited them along and they decided to make the Pitt Rivers their home for the afternoon covering the balcony with their craft projects!

Photograph by John Wreford

A Private View was held for community members and organisations involved with the project, of two new temporary displays, Syrians Unknown and Identity Without Borders. Syrians Unknown is a photographic exhibition by John Wreford which will be on display until September 2017. Visit the Upper Gallery to encounter large scale portraits of people displaced from Syria, now surviving and thriving in Istanbul, Turkey. Each person photographed has written powerful testimonies about their experiences. The exhibition is in English and Arabic.

Identity Without Borders is a display of Pitt Rivers Museum objects and loaned objects co-curated by volunteers who came to the UK seeking asylum. The two case displays were developed with community volunteers in partnership with Refugee Resource and Asylum Welcome. Through facilitated visits to the collections volunteers have used familiar museum objects to share stories from their home countries and reflect on their identities.

Nuzhat Abbas singing at Identity Without Borders

We also co-hosted, with TORCH, an event exploring identity, memory and migration. The event was a really interesting and thought provoking session chaired by the Museum Director Dr Laura Van Broekhoven. Lots of people came along to discuss this timely topic. 

Amir Darwish, a Syrian/Kurdish poet, led two Poetry workshops at the museum. Budding and established wordsmiths were encouraged to join in.  People who took part in the workshops also had the chance to perform their poems at the Identity Without Borders event.

The Pitt Rivers Museum has also supported English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) provision for refugees. Oxford University Student Administration identified the museum as a location to teach English to refugees. The volunteer teachers delivered language lessons for women with young children, and museum provided family activities for the children, enabling parents to attend.

African Dance Oxford performing at Identity Without Borders

Identity Without Borders, was the public evening event celebrating the project, with our community partners performing dance, poetry and music in the Pitt Rivers Museum. The event was a celebration of identity and who we are - showcasing the two new exhibitions: Syrians Unknown and Identity Without Borders. Refugees make up most of the performers and this event was a culmination of activities which have spanned over the last three months.

All of these events are part of the Migration project which aims to connect people who have suffered forced migration to engage with the collections and the PRM as a space. 

Thanks go to ...

Firstly thank you to all the community members and especially Asylum Welcome and Refugee Resource for their support. Thank you to Nicola and Beth who co-managed the project. Many thanks to everyone in the museum who helped get the migration project going, especially to Al and Chris who managed to install both displays at a very busy time. I'd also like to say thank you to George who helped translate activities into Arabic - really, really helpful! 

Jozie Kettle
VERVE Programming and 
Communications Officer

Making it easier to explore the Museum's African mask collections

Work continues on selecting masks for the new displays in the Museums' Court (ground floor). We have masks from many cultures, but our African mask collections demonstrate significant historical importance and variety.

In addition to new displays of African masks as part of VERVE, colleagues are also working on a parallel  - and much larger - display of African masks at ground level. Here, the lead researcher on this work - Zena McGreevy - shows you some of the wonderful masks we've been looking at so far and invites anyone with information about them to get in touch!

Hi my name is Zena and I work at the Pitt Rivers Museum. Over the last few months I have been busy photographing the Museum’s collection of more than 270 African masks. I’ve taken images like this to record each mask and view it from different angles:

Mask from the Idoma people of Nigeria, PRM 1932.33.5 © Pitt Rivers Museum

 

 Three views of an Igbo mask from Nigeria, PRM 1938.15.8 © Pitt Rivers Museum

Me photographing an African mask © Pitt Rivers Museum

You can explore the collections for yourself using the Object Database on our website. It updates regularly to include any new information or images we add in-house, so you're guaranteed to find all the known information we have. To see all the African masks select ‘mask’ from the drop-down list in the Classification field then type ‘Africa’ into the Continent field, then hit Perform Search. You'll discover most of the masks are from Nigeria, plus you can also find examples from Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Congo, Gabon, Guinea, Malawi, Sierra Leone, Swaziland, Tanzania and Zambia. If you want to focus on masks from a particular country, simply search again selecting the appropriate country from the drop-down list.

Mask depicting a buffalo head from the Bamum people of Cameroon,  PRM 1959.9.1 B © Pitt Rivers Museum

Views of four-faced helmet mask from Sierra Leone, PRM 1908.23.3 © Pitt Rivers Museum

To find out more about a particular mask, click on an individual record. This will give you all the information we have, including cultural group, specific geographic location and dates (if known), any researcher's or donor's notes, original accession book entries and display captions, etc. You will also be able to see any photographs we have.

Current display of African masks © Pitt Rivers Museum

We are always keen to improve this information, and it can be quite sparse for certain objects which perhaps arrived in the Museum many years ago without much documentation. I am particularly interested in learning and understanding how masks, like these, are used in African masquerade.

Looking at the Museum’s current main display you cannot tell that African masks are often worn as part of a larger masquerade costume. New displays are being planned on the south side of the Museum's ground floor (Court). The main case will focus on clusters of masks from various Nigerian groups - including complete costumes and dynamic images of masquerades - and additional displays of masks from Cameroon and Sierra Leone will be installed above.

Inviting people to look at such up-to-date images is enabling experts around the world to examine this important collection. With their advice and help we intend to provide you with better quality information and displays/visuals, whether you're in the Museum or at your computer. Exciting times ahead! Keep an eye on this blog where I will keep you posted of new developments!


In the meantime, if you have any information you can tell me about the African masks in this collection send an email to zena.mcgreevy@prm.ox.ac.uk

Zena