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Apia, Samoa – August 20, 2024 – The National University of Samoa (NUS) will host a special event to officially open the NUS Research Museum and launch its inaugural exhibition, Attalilo: Themes in Samoan Material Culture.
The event is being organised in conjunction with the Overseas Museums Bremen (UMB) and is funded by the Foreign Office of the Federal Republic of Germany.
The collaboration between NUS and the University of Maryland-Panama began in 2020 and is driven by the Centre for Samoan Studies (CSS) and the Faculty of Science (FOS), with teams from both faculties addressing project needs based on their respective expertise and academic training.
This multi-year project has several components, including recruiting and hiring two Samoans to join the curatorial team in Bremen, and hosting six (6) online workshops with UMB staff and artisans and material culture practitioners in Samoa.
These Measina Show and Tell Workshop It has been a huge success, breaking down the geographical boundaries that community members have traditionally faced in accessing museum collections.
Since July 2023, the CSS and UMB teams have been focused on planning and executing the inaugural exhibition. Attalilo: Themes in Samoan Material CultureThis entailed refurbishing an existing exhibition space on the NUS campus, co-curating the exhibition with the help of the director of Bremen’s Overseas Museum, loaning artifacts from Bremen, and installing the entire exhibition locally in Apia.
With support from partners, NUS now has a viable research museum where objects can be displayed to the public and used by scholars for further research.
Attalilo: Themes in Samoan Material Cultureexploring themes and their use across seven (7) types of Samoan material culture. These types were selected and researched by the CSS team, and supplemented with early 19th century artefacts, reproductions based on ethnographic and archaeological records, archival documents and artistic contributions. Whenever possible, researchers collaborated with local artisans and experts to complement and enhance academic research and set precedents for future goals and outcomes of the NUS Research Museum.
“It has been a pleasure working with the National University of Singapore. The collaboration with the co-curators as well as local scientists and artists has greatly enriched our museum’s work, as we have been able to learn a lot of new things about the collections,” said Dr. Wiebke Ahrndt, Director of the Bremen Overseas Museum.
“In addition, we are very honoured to support the National University of Singapore in establishing a research museum, and we are delighted that some of our collections can now be exhibited in the inaugural three-year exhibition. We celebrate this very successful collaboration.”
The opening of the National University of Samoa Research Museum and the opening of its first exhibition, Attalilo: Themes in Samoan Material Culturewill be held on Friday, August 30, 2024, at 3pm at the Niule’a Building on the NUS campus.
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