RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE PAST? SPOILS OF WAR IN SWEDISH MUSEUM DISPLAYS

Abstract

The paper’s goal is to attempt to show what narrative Swedish museums conduct on spoils of war and trophies which are in their collections, how this strategy was worked out, and how to understand the responsibility versus the visitor watching such objects. Materials from a symposium and a conference held in Stockholm in 2008 have been analysed, and so have current texts (labels, curatorial texts, entries in online catalogues). Swedish museum curators have considered their responsibility to be proper preservation, studying, conserving, displaying those objects, making them available to the public (exhibitions, online bases), thus the basic museum activity has turned into a synonym of modern responsibility. The key activity which enabled the working out of this joint policy is to be found in detailed provenance studies.