Collecting to Shape and Reflect the Nation Conference (In-person and online)
22-24 October 2026 // V&A South Kensington
‘Collecting to Shape and Reflect the Nation: Changing Museum Strategies from the Nineteenth to the Twentieth Century’ Conference is a multifaceted exploration of how national museum collections were assembled, shape and reflect national identities.
The Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) and the Germanisches Nationalmuseum (GNM) are collaborating to organise a pair of conferences exploring the relationship between museums’ histories and their future missions. This first conference examines how large-scale museums with national remits can critically engage with their own institutional pasts to inform their present-day identities and considers how these institutions can contribute to fostering social cohesion in increasingly diverse twenty-first-century societies.
Focusing on the formation, interpretation, and display of national collections, the conference takes as its point of departure a range of major museums and memory institutions founded or fundamentally reshaped amid the political and historical transformations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Bringing together an international group of scholars and museum professionals, it explores how these institutions have shaped—and been shaped by—changing ideas of nationhood, identity, empire, and public responsibility.
Speakers will address questions including:
- How were museum profiles and their claimed roles in society continually redefined throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries?
- How did museums communicate ideas of nationhood, nationalism, and imperialism within changing political and intellectual contexts?
- How have museum professionals in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries sought to confront historical legacies in order to redefine, stabilise, and legitimise their institutions’ missions?
Conference Programme (provisional)
Thursday, 22 October 2026
14.00–14.30 Registration and refreshments
14.30–14.45 Institutional welcome
14.45–15.15 Introduction (Joachim Berger, Darja Jesse and Simona Valeriani)
Chair: Richard Espley (V&A)
The Nation in the Museum: Postcolonial Collections and Repatriation Debates in the Democratic Republic of Congo (1970–today)
Collecting the Nation under Colonial Rule: The Musée Khai-Dinh in Vietnam
Restitution and the Making of National Museums after 1918: The Polish–Soviet Case
Chair: Diana Unterhitzenberger (GNM)
The Strategy of a Young State on the Periphery of Europe. The Establishment of a National Museum in Poland during the Interwar Period
Doubling Size and Changing Remit: the Tate Gallery’s Shift from National to International Collection in the 1920s
From National Monument to Museum Satellite: The Meunier Museum and the Contested Notion of Nationhood in Belgium
Chair: Darja Jesse (GNM)
The Significance of the Hindeloopen room: A Transnational History through Provenance, Museum Strategies and Practices
Persia in Fragments: Safavid Carpets and the Museum Imagination
Weaving Histories of Deaccession in the 1930s: A Byzantine Textile between Düsseldorf and London
Chair: Simona Valeriani (V&A)
Re-reading the Naturhistorisches Museum Vienna: Revising Architectural and Curatorial Narratives
Belgique Ancienne: Antoine Schayes and the Collection of National Archaeology in Brussels (1835–1859)
National Baggage: The National Gallery of Scotland’s ‘on-off relationship’ with its Scottish collection, c. 1920─2020
16.45–17.15 Coffee/Tea
Chair: Joachim Berger (GNM)
A National Museum in an International Network: The National Gallery London and Transnational Cultural Exchange in the Mid-Nineteenth Century
Collecting Antiquities as an Imperial Mission. German and Ottoman Museum Strategies during the late 19th and early 20th century
British Mandate Palestine at the V&A: Ernest Tatham Richmond’s Donation of Watercolours of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, 1924
Expertise, Forgeries, and National Positioning: The International Museum Association (c. 1898–1939)
To attend online, please buy your ticket here.
