Kirikara Koraua

Biography

Kirikara’s role as Assistant Museum Curator involves supporting conservation, collection care, and exhibitions. She also works on schools and community programmes and leads tours of the museum. For the past year, Kirikara has been working with her colleagues on the International Research Centre for Intangible (IRCI) Cultural Heritage in the Asia Pacific Region, by collecting data from available resources in Te Umwanibong (Kiribati National Museum). 

In previous years, Kirikara has been working on an exhibition about the types of Kiribati fishing gear used in the past with her colleagues, using published books and cultural documentation shared from cultural knowledge holders more than 20 years ago. This year, Te Umwanibong museum staff worked collaboratively with the Postal Service on an exhibition of stamps. She often works together with these cultural knowledge holders on conservation work by repairing and restoring collections that have been damaged by using local materials received from native plants such as coconut leaves, coconut fibre, pandanus leaves and more.

Kirikara also carries out cultural mapping work at outer islands, collecting more cultural collections that have significant stories and information related to the island or an individual’s identity as well as Kiribati heritage. She also collaborates with communities to make replica artefacts.

Kirikara has completed the course, Professional Certificate on Heritage Management, from the University of the South Pacific; and she is currently continuing her studies for a degree-level qualification in Management Studies. In 2022, Kirikara attended a course on Weaving a Net (Work) of Care for Oceanic Collections: A Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Museum Institute, in Hawaii, which concentrates on museum theory such as collection care, conservation, and exhibitions. Kirikara also attended a short course on Collections, Conservation, and Sustainable Development (CollAsia) in Cambodia. To learn more specifically about the museum field, Kirikara is joining the virtual course on Preservation of Tribal Cultural Materials in Tribal Collections and Developing a Collections Management Plan for Tribal Collections. 

Her professional interests are working with communities and cultural knowledge holders to preserve and protect collections, protecting historical and cultural sites from any disaster risks by using traditional skills and knowledge; as well as applying theories, materials, and tools for sustainability and development.

At the British Museum
During Kirikara’s time on the International Training Programme she was based in the Department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas and spent her UK partner placement at Glasgow Museums.

As an ongoing project throughout the six-week programme, fellows were asked to use their existing skills and experience, and the knowledge gained throughout the annual programme, to create, develop, and propose a new interpretation for an object currently on display in the British Museum. Working in her departmental group, Kirikara used their object, a hunting coat made from deer skin, to emphasise the importance of working with the community of origin when displaying objects significant to that culture.

Kirikara’s participation on the International Training Programme was generously supported by the Aall Foundation.