In this lecture Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll presents recent cases of restoration claims from European museum collections to Indigenous communities. The complex biographies of key museum objects exemplify, embody, and refract the tensions of nineteenth-century Australian history. She focuses on how the verbal and visual languages of Aboriginal people had influence upon the classification of scientific, legal, and artistic objects in the metropolises and museums of nineteenth-century colonial powers. The thesis of Art in the Time of Colony is that an anachronistic reading of the colonial archive by contemporary artists works towards a decolonial writing of history in the future. It is based on collaborations with artists such as Julie Gough and Maree Clarke in museum collections in Berlin, Cambridge, Canberra and Melbourne.

Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll is a British Academy Newton Fellow in the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of ‘Art in the Time of Colony’ (Ashgate, 2014) and is currently working on a monograph about repatriation. Her recent publications include ‘Sartre’s Boomerang: The archive as choreographed ready-made’, ‘The Presence of Absence: Tommy McRae and Judy Watson in Australia, the imaginary grandstand at the Royal Academy in London’ and ‘Living Paint, even after the death of the colony’. She wrote her PhD at Harvard University on ‘Imaging Nation: Colonial History and Contemporary Australian Art’. She is a guest editor of the Discipline journal and of the collection ‘Botanical Drift: Economic Botany and its Plant Protagonists’. Her films have most recently been shown at Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, Extracity Kunsthal Antwerp and the Irish Film Institute. www.kdja.org