British Museum exhibition Silk Roads: Past connections, present collaborations

On 26 September 2024, the British Museum launched its major exhibition Silk Roads, exploring the movement of people, objects and ideas across Afro-Eurasia from 500 to 1000 CE – a significant period in the history of cross-cultural connectivity.

The exhibition brings together over 300 objects from the British Museum collection, as well as 29 national and international lenders. These include star loans from Japan to Spain, from Uzbekistan to Scotland.

The exhibition provided many welcome opportunities to build on existing partnerships and develop new ones. In this talk, the co-curators of Silk Roads will discuss how the exhibition came together, and approaches they took, with a focus on sections related to the Islamic world. It will highlight some of the key objects on display and the collaborations that made the exhibition possible.

The lecture will be chaired by Professor Scott Redford.

About the speakers

Dr Sue Brunning is Curator of the European Early Medieval Collections at the British Museum. She specialises in early medieval material culture, with particular interest in the Sutton Hoo ship burial, cross-cultural connections, materiality, artefact biography, and multidisciplinary methodologies.

Sue completed her PhD at UCL Institute of Archaeology in 2013. She joined the British Museum as a volunteer in 2007, before becoming Project Curator (2010) and then Lead Curator (2012) on the refurbishment of Room 41, the Sir Paul and Lady Ruddock Gallery of Sutton Hoo and Europe 300–1100 (opened 2014). 

In 2019, Sue curated Sutton Hoo 80: Discovery, Destiny, Donation in Room 2, a mixed archival and artefact display which marked the 80th anniversary of the Sutton Hoo ship burial’s excavation.

She is currently co-curator of the British Museum’s Silk Roads exhibition and co-author of the new book Silk Roads (2024).

Dr Luk Yu-ping is Basil Gray Curator of Chinese Paintings, Prints, and Central Asian Collections at the British Museum. Previously, she served as the Curator of Chinese Collections at the Victoria and Albert Museum and was the Project Curator for the British Museum's exhibition Ming: 50 Years That Changed China. Yu-Ping also held an academic position as Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Studies at Lingnan University in Hong Kong.

She completed her PhD at the University of Oxford. She is the author of The Empress and the Heavenly Masters: A Study of the Ordination Scroll of Empress Zhang (1493) (2016) and co-editor of Ming China: Courts and Contacts, 1400–1450 (2016).

She is currently co-curator of the British Museum’s Silk Roads exhibition and co-author of the new book Silk Roads (2024).

Dr Elisabeth R. O'Connell is Curator of Byzantine World at the British Museum. She has edited or co-edited five books, including Egypt: Faith after the pharaohs (2015), which accompanied the BM exhibition by the same name, and more recently Egypt and empire: The formation of religious identity after Rome (2022) and The Hay archive of Coptic spells on leather: A multi-disciplinary approach to the materiality of magical practice (2022). 

She has conducted fieldwork in Tunisia, Sudan and Egypt, where she co-directed a British Museum Expedition from 2009 to 2013. Elisabeth has been principal investigator for multiple major grants, and held a number of fellowships in the UK, USA and Egypt, most recently an Early Career Fellowship and Empires of Faith Fellowship, both funded by the Leverhulme Trust.

She received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently co-curator of the British Museum’s Silk Roads exhibition and co-author of the new book Silk Roads (2024).

Contact

Email: rw51@soas.ac.uk.

Image: Section of a wall painting from the Palace of Varakhsha, Uzbekistan, about 730 CE. Collection of the State Museum of Arts of Uzbekistan. Photo by Andrey Arakelyan