Curator’s Choice Films

Watch curators discussing a variety of objects in museums' collections with links to empire and colonialism.

These films are part of an ongoing partnership between MMMV and the Irish Museums Association. For more, watch Brian Crowley’s use of an 1808 map of Kilmainham Gaol to look at penal transportation to Australia, and Dan Breen’s discussion of a bill of lading that reveals Cork's connections with the enslavement of people on Jamaican sugar plantations. 

Helen O'Carroll, Curator/Manager of Kerry County Museum, discusses a sketch map hidden by Roger Casement, and unpacks old ideas about the involvement of the people of Kerry in his trial.

Agrippa Njanina, Assistant Curator of World Cultures at National Museums NI, explains the importance of the mbira to Shona people in Zimbabwe and around the world, and describes how he is using his own mbira to engage with groups in Northern Ireland in decolonial projects.

In this video Paolo Viscardi, Keeper of Natural History at the National Museum of Ireland, discusses how, although the collection reflects Ireland's historic role in colonial exploitation, it is also valuable for researching and documenting global biodiversity. A project with the Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum at the University of Singapore has involved collaborative digitisation of specimens in the Dublin collection. This includes an example of the Selangor Mud Snake, collected in 1914 by CPW Flynn (c.1885-1927), a General Manager at Bukit Sembawang plantation in Seletar who frequently collected reptiles. Only nine examples of the Selangor Mud Snake are known worldwide, and when a new specimen was found in Singapore in 2020, Flynn's example helped to show its presence there in the early twentieth century. 

Roisin Doherty, Curator of the Tower Museum, Derry City and Strabane District Council, discusses a toy that showed children that the sun was always shining in some part of the British Empire, promoting British nationalism in the early twentieth century.