Return Home

Description

Return Home is a project that examines the colonial histories of museums and supports a movement towards decolonizing, repatriating, and reconstructing. Informed by the profound impact of war, genocide, and American imperialism, this project seeks to embrace the practice of returning home that focuses on the repatriation of ancestral art and heritage to Cambodia. The project particularly focuses on stolen ancient Cambodian sculptures that memorialize the Golden Age of Khmer culture from the 9th – 15th centuries, and particularly the sculptures of looted Khmer Buddha statue heads that are currently housed in American and European museums with the disconnected, decapitated statues of their bodies in the temples of Cambodia. The Return Home project provides engagement and a list of resources and published materials related to looting and repatriation. The project also addresses the problematic normalization of the Buddha head in consumer and tourist cultures, decapitated and dismembered deity bodies, the history of looting, the danger of cultural appropriation, and the importance of cultural context that museum displays often erase.