Think Africa Think V&A: Understanding Our Collections

We examine the V&A and its history and relationship with Africa, to understand the impact on the museum’s collecting strategies and practices today, including shifts in acknowledging the past and present achievements of Africans and their artistic creativity, and the challenges faced in making these acquisitions more accessible.

Founded at the height of empire after the 1851 Great Exhibition, the V&A like many museums at the time viewed Sub-Saharan African artefacts as ethnography and not as art. Hence the V&A’s larger collections of British, European, Asian, Egyptian, and Middle Eastern materials. Over a prolonged period, the Museum’s position that it never collected Africa was stated as ‘fact’ by both staff and visitor alike. However, after extensive research between 2005 - 2008, the Museum discovered it had over four thousand objects associated with Africa and the Diaspora. Curatorial teams now found themselves caring for objects they had little knowledge about, and that interpreting colonial collections for a post-colonial audience was a challenge.

We will hear from our museum experts, curators, and our visitor experience and volunteer teams as they share and discuss uncomfortable narratives, extraordinary object stories, and how they bring hidden histories to life.

We share a survey of the Global African collections across the Museum, and how the work of the V&A Research Institute, international renewable partnerships , and curatorial departments promote Global Africa in their projects.