Season’s Greetings and Reflections on 2018
Written by Jessica Juckes, International Training Programme Assistant
We wish the global network of ITP fellows and followers Season’s Greetings and all the best for the coming year!
What a year 2018 has been…
The 13th annual ITP summer programme saw 23 museum professionals from 17 countries join the global network, spending six weeks in the UK at the British Museum and 11 UK partner museums. Four new countries were added to the network: Azerbaijan, Nepal, Philippines and Rwanda. The ITP network now boasts 276 museum professionals from 43 countries!
Our Senior Fellow this year was Andrea Terron Gomez (ITP 2017, Guatemala), Professor, Department of Social Sciences and Anthropology, Del Valle University, Guatemala City.
Summer programme fellows again this year worked in partnership on their exhibition proposal projects – now titled Object in focus – and chose objects outside their specialisms from a selection on the theme of ‘journeys’ put together by British Museum curators. We increased the number of external speakers this year to add a plurality of voices, and also added new trips to Sutton Hoo, Kingston Lacy and Constantine Ltd.
We were delighted to welcome National Museums Northern Ireland (NMNI) as a UK partner for the first time. We couldn’t get enough of Belfast, with THREE visits over the year!
-First, NMNI very generously hosted our UK partner meeting in February.
-Then three fellows (along with a Senior Fellow, ITP Manager and BM Chief Photographer!) flew over for the summer programme placement.
-And finally, the full ITP team plus more four fellows were back for the Museums Association conference in November!
This year we delivered ITP+ Museum interpretation at the Nubia Museum in Aswan, Egypt – our third ITP+ short course. 12 ITP fellows from Egypt, Sudan, India and Uganda attended the week-long programme along with 13 participants from 6 museums selected by the Ministry of Antiquities, Egypt. We were delighted to invite course facilitators from the British Museum and also ITP UK partner Campbell Price (Manchester Museum) and programme partner Anna Garnett (Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology).
We continued our partnership with the Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), Massachusetts, USA, for the second year. Four students from the WPI spent seven weeks with the ITP working on research into the wider infrastructure of museum-based training worldwide.
The Spotlight Loan exhibition Rodin: rethinking the fragment – a collaboration between Barbara Vujanovic (ITP 2016, Croatia), the British Museum, and Partnership UK institutions – travelled to the first two of its three venues, Abbott Hall Art Gallery in Kendal and the Holburne Museum in Bath.
Fellow OmarJoseph Nasser-Khoury (ITP 2013, Palestine) was at the BM for four months for a Knowledge Exchange Fellowship, working on the documentation of the British Museum’s Palestinian textiles collection. During this time, he was able to meet fellows attending both the summer programme and legacy projects. We were happy to see two fellows back at the BM in the Department of Ancient Egypt & Sudan, Ikhlas Abdllatief (ITP 2006, Sudan) and Ayman El-Tayeb (ITP 2009), Sudan), as they undertook training as part of the British Council funded project Circulating Artefacts. Fellows were also hosted in London by the ITP, for British Museum conferences and symposia: Chithra Kallur (ITP 2017, India), Abiti Nelson (ITP 2013, Uganda), Shreen Amin (ITP 2016, Egypt), JM Gandhimathi (ITP 2017, India) and Heba Khairy (ITP 2017, Egypt).
Two UK partners found themselves back in Armenia this year, following conversations and collaboration dating back to their participation in the Learning, engagement & museums workshop held in Yerevan in 2016. Ronan Brindley (Manchester Art Gallery) worked with Armenian ITP fellows on the Museum Education Summer School in Lori, and Elaine Addington (Glasgow Museums) was reunited with the fellows in Yerevan to participate in a conference for Museums Week.
And work continued on the ITP Collaborative Award project Road to Reconciliation, starting with a meeting and community workshop in Uganda in February held by awardee Abiti Nelson (ITP 2013, Uganda) with fellows from Uganda, Kenya, Egypt and Sudan, community representatives, as well as John Giblin, former British Museum Head of Africa section.
2019 will start in style with Rodin: rethinking the fragment travelling to its final venue, The New Art Gallery Walsall, from 2 February (with ITP fellow Barbara Vujanovic giving her curator’s talk on 8 February), and the launch of the ITP Collaborative Award Road to reconciliation touring community exhibition in Uganda showcasing the stories of South Sudanese refugees in Northern Ugandan camps.
We look forward to an amazing year to come, with exciting projects in development that we are looking forward to sharing with you!