Madeleine Thien & Priya Basil: Objects Talk Back
Madeleine Thien
Edinburgh Futures Institute
17 Aug
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The Humboldt Forum's 'Objects Talk Back' project invited authors to select an object from the museum's collection and write about it however they wished. Novelist Madeleine Thien chose the painting, 'Three Uyghur Princes'. She talks with project curator Priya Basil about her approach to this unusual brief, how encounters with objects can remake us, and how the project intersects with one of the thorniest parts of our Repair theme – reparations – by engaging with gaps, erasures, and (un)truths in colonial histories.