folded item

Drawing for a seminar entitled: Rebellious Graphics: replacing repatriated prophecies

For those members of the Pitt Rivers Museum community who would like to debate the shared opportunities that the repatriation of museum artefacts signals for both artists and anthropologists. The example we have in mind concerns a set of notebooks containing indecipherable hieroglyphic messages from the Naga prophet Gaidinliu (1915-1993). The Pitt Rivers could return Gaidinliu’s belongings to Nagaland in the future and, as a matter for open-ended speculation, our seminar would reverse the usual direction of decolonising attention in order to explore how her enigmatic notations could be creatively replaced if the notebooks left Oxford. Her elaborate mark-making invites discussion on the conceptual distinction between writing and drawing. Consequently, our seminar would debate the kinds of contemporary drawing practices that could occupy the museological gap created by repatriation.

Gaidinliu said the contents of her notebooks were dictated by spirits, explaining that the symbolic notation she used would only become comprehensible when the time was right for the liberation of the Naga people. In Gaidinliu’s youth this meant independence from British rule and the notebooks came to the Pitt Rivers following their confiscation during an unsuccessful rebellion she led in 1932. More recently, the anthropologist Arkotong Longkumer took photographic reproductions back to Nagaland where, for Gaidinliu’s present-day disciples, even facsimiles can be valued as bearers of her encrypted prophecies. These days they are said to predict secession from the Indian State. 

The prospect of the notebooks actually reappearing in the Naga homeland will surely interest a wide range of artists, most obviously those active in northeast India today. But their simultaneous disappearance from the Museum’s archives will be of significance too. The Naga will rightly want this space used for updated representations of their own and facilitating interactions like this is already a well-developed part of the Pitt Rivers curatorial work. However, other visual arts communities may perceive a different archival absence. The political imagination at work in Gaidinliu’s mark-making has created a placeholder in the Museum for diversely rebellious graphics, for drawings envisioning all kinds of postponed emancipations.

This folded drawing was made on a printout of the title page of Arkotong Longkumer’s 2016 article ‘Lines that speak: the Gaidinliu notebooks as language, prophecy, and textuality’, (Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 6 [2], pp.123–147).