Magdalene Odundo in Cambridge on display at The Fitzwilliam Museum (UK) until July 2022, seeks to illustrate the inspiration and influence of the city’s museum’s permanent collections on Odundo, when she studied in the Foundation Course at Cambridge School of Art. Co-curated with cultural historian Helen Ritchie, it displays Odundo’s pots, made many years after she left the city.
Accompanying Odundo’s work are the works of other British 20th-century studio potters we are told she met at that time, including her teacher Zoe Ellison. The majority of the exhibition is made up of much older pots, lent by the University Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography, from as far afield as Papua New Guinea, Peru, New Mexico and sub-Saharan Africa. The exhibition may seem something of a vanity project, but it does raise some interesting thoughts about the ethics of display.
The UK has some outstanding collections; the British Museum has over 8 million objects gathered from across the world. Many of these collections were established during the period of violent colonial occupation, and some artefacts were unquestionably stolen. These trophies of conquest were acquired as “curiosities'' with the subtext of presenting British culture as superior to others. The layout of the British Museum remains Eurocentric with the Asian galleries furthest from the main entrance. Until 2001, third-world countries and the cultures of indigenous Americas were held separately in the Museum of Mankind. Consider the semiotics of visiting the African collection
