School of Arts
Panggah Ardiyansyah
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Key information
Key information
- Roles
- School of Arts PhD researcher
- Department
- School of Arts
- Qualifications
- MA (SOAS)
- Email address
- pa15@soas.ac.uk
- Thesis title
- Heritage as accumulated meaning: Transactions, appropriation and biographies of Hindu-Buddhist materials in pre-modern Indonesia
- Internal Supervisors
- Professor Ashley Thompson, Dr Crispin Branfoot & Dr Mulaika Hijjas
Biography
| Panggah Ardiyansyah is a PhD candidate of History of Art and Archaeology at SOAS University of London. Prior to doctoral project, he has spent more than a decade working professionally as a heritage educator for Borobudur Temple in Magelang, Indonesia, where he was responsible to design and implement guided tours and travelling exhibitions. In 2021, he co-edited a volume entitled Returning Southeast Asia’s Past: Objects, Museums, and Restitution. This volume explores the lives of artefacts which have been repatriated from the West to museums in Southeast Asia and is the first edited volume entirely devoted to object restitution to this region. In 2022, he worked as a consultant for the British Institute for International and Comparative Law’s project entitled “Beyond Restitution: Exploring the Story of Cultural Objects After Their Repatriation”. For this project, he investigated the afterlives of materials returned to Indonesia, including the much-coveted Diponegoro kris returned by the Netherlands and religious objects donated to Nias Heritage Museum from abroad. He has published his works through various media, including chapters in edited volumes, journal articles, blog posts, and podcasts. |
Research interests
| Panggah’s doctoral research focuses on the afterlives of Hindu-Buddhist materials in premodern Indonesia, a project which aims to contribute to decolonising the field of Indonesian art history and archaeology. In particular, the work aims to deconstruct the rigid categorisation opposing the classical period and the subsequent Islamic artistic tradition and to reconstruct the long history of ancient Hindu-Buddhist materials across times and cultures in probing appropriations, transactions, and reconfigurations. He reads broadly on Southeast Asian art, including the ways in which ancient materials have been re-used and appropriated in more recent times through various productions of knowledge. His interest in the colonial collection has led him to engage closely with the questions around object restitution and how this process can decolonise the ways we write the histories of the arts from the region. Coming from Indonesia, he is also personally invested in reading about the historiography of modern Indonesia. |
