The Looting Lab is an interdisciplinary research hub for the study of looted cultural heritage based at the University of Toronto developing innovative solutions to cultural dispossession, loss, and restitution.
“Loot” comes from the Hindustani word lūṭ, which describes theft and banditry as well as dispossession, destruction, and plunder. We use this concept to unite critical heritage conversations across disciplines and methodologies.
Upcoming Events
WORKING GROUP MEETING #7 (May 16)
The Praxis of Plunder: Collection, Curation, and Display
This month, we will examine the politics and practices behind the collection, curation, and display of looted objects. How does the “gaze” produced by museums, archives, galleries, auction houses, and libraries shape how we view, understand, and engage with loot? What types of discourses are produced by these curatorial techniques, and to what end? We will also explore alternative methods of curation and display, considering if there is a “better” way to collect, curate, and display with loot — and if so, what is it? The goal of this meeting is to deconstruct taken-for-granted practices, interrogate the objectives of loot-collecting institutions, and, hopefully, begin to develop a new “toolbox” of curatorial techniques.
Readings
This month’s readings focus on dynamics of display, and the contested nature of both. There are a few options — please pick at least one historical reading and one contemporary reading.
Contemporary Contestations (pick one or more of the following)
- Anderson, Stephanie B. 2019. “Museums, Decolonization and Indigenous Artists as First Cultural Responders at the New Canadian Museum for Human Rights.” Museum and Society 2: 173–92.
- Wastiau, Boris and Arnaud Lsmond-Mertes. 2025. “‘Tervuren Remains a Place of False Memories’: On the Impossibility of an Epistemological Rupture at the Royal Museum for Central Africa (Belgium): An Interview with Boris Wastiau.” In Reframing the Ethnographic Museum. UCL Press.
Historical Legacies (pick one or more of the following)
- Riggs, Christina. 2013. “Colonial Visions: Egyptian Antiquities and Contested Histories in the Cairo Museum.” Museum Worlds: Advances in Research 1: 65-84.
- Pham, Vincent. 2025. "Turning the Crank: The Performance of Empire through Tipu's Tiger." Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 54(1): 225-237.
- Hartwell, Nicole M. 2021. “Framing colonial war loot: The ‘captured’ spolia opima of Kunwar Singh.” Journal of the History of Collections. pp. 1-15.
- Hevia, James L. 1994. “Loot's fate: The economy of plunder and the moral life of objects from the summer palace of the emperor of China.” History and Anthropology 6(4):319-345.