Ashley Thompson - "On Decoloniality and Restitution: Invoking Ganesha"

Consecrated at the temple complex of Koh Ker in the 10th century, documented by French colonial explorers in the 19th century, restored under the supervision of colonial administrators anticipating tourism in the 20th century, trafficked by a British dealer via Bangkok, Manchester and Berlin to an American collector at the turn of the 21st century, returned by American authorities to Cambodia in 2023, a monumental Khmer statue of the Hindu god Ganesha has found its place, for the time-being, in the gardens of the National Museum in Phnom Penh. Following Ganesha’s lead, this essay probes the unsettled relations between decoloniality and restitution. It is of concern that colonial conservation of Khmer ‘art’ laid the ground for its post-colonial market exploitation; and that, in following on from decolonization (defined as a political event), restitution may only appear to lead to decoloniality (defined as a cultivated quality in and of social-epistemological realms), forging a path of forward progress, when in fact it risks comprising a seamless return to an old order whereby ‘art’ remains ‘art’ and nationalism serves as cover for a still invincible coloniality. If a national museum is often posited as the condition of possibility of successful restitution today, it is also the condition of possibility of its failure to cultivate decoloniality in the wake of decolonization. Ganesha appears however to fend off such an imminent fate, enabling us instead to imagine the potentiality of the (de)colonial museum.

Ashley Thompson is Hiram W Woodward Chair of Southeast Asian Art at SOAS University of London. She maintains a sustained research focus on premodern Cambodian arts and literatures, and complements this with more punctual work on the contemporary period and the arts of the larger Southeast Asian region. Her research is informed by deconstruction and psychoanalysis, and revolves around questions of memory, political and cultural transition, embodiment, sexual difference and subjectivity. Books include Engendering the Buddhist State: Territory, Sovereignty and Sexual Difference in the Inventions of Angkor (Routledge 2016) and two recent edited volumes, Early Theravadin Cambodia: Perspectives from Art and Archaeology (NUS Press 2022) and The Routledge Handbook of Theravada Buddhism (2022). She leads Circumambulating Objects: Paradigms of Restitution of Southeast Asian Art, a three-year research program funded by the Getty Connecting Art Histories initiative.