I'm Kam Raslan @kamraslan, your curator this week. I'd like to look at history telling through the museum experience, which for many is our introduction to the very notion of a past. The objects inside have survived time but what if you live in a world of impermanence? 1/11 kr

I am fond of Malaysia's Muzium Negara. It has 4 rooms: prehistoric, royal Malay, colonial and post independence. It's like a British museum: objects of metal and stone, deterministic (and that's who we are!), a male history (guns!), avoiding unseemly emotions. 2/11 kr

In the colonial period room it was pointed out to me that even Malaysians have ingested the notion that history begins with the arrival of Europeans (1500s). Now there are dates, names, linear history, objects that have survived through time. What came before? And Borneo? 3/11 kr

2000 years of maritime southeast Asia goes unrecorded. Perhaps because it was not present-day Malaysia's story alone, or that a story of trading (by women) and sailing (men) to far horizons does not fit today's narrative? But mainly because nothing remains, no objects. 4/11 kr

Malaysians eat, wear, speak, worship and have their (mostly) open world view shaped by this global trading history or closed by its end. Our history's ingredients are in a Traditional Chinese Medicine cabinet, a sambal, in the sponge-like Malay language and in the sea. 5/11 kr

Carried on seasonal winds a back-and-forth trade stretched from the jungles to local entrepots and then to ports in China, India, Persia, East Africa, Luzon, Java, Arabia and ultimately to Rome, Constantinople or Venice. Men and women did the trading. 6/11 kr

Incomplete list of traded items that may have originated in Malaysia or just passed through: Very rare aromatic jungle woods like agarwood, silk, cotton, ceramics, cloves, nutmeg, mace, tin, silver, gold, ivory, horses, slaves, peacocks, corals, turtle shells... 7/11 kr

...benzoin, betel leaf, white umbrellas, pepper, pearls, iron, coconuts, pilgrims, missionaries, opium, alcohol, cinnamon, cassia, frankincense, sea cucumber, guns and much more. From Spanish Mexico alone came silver, chilli and frangipani trees. 8/11 kr

Each item tells an individual story, collectively they tell of movement, mercantile trust and rivalry, and deep historical interconnections. But unlike in temperate Europe these artifacts and their wooden homes have long-since perished in Malaysia's tropical impermanence. 9/11 kr

How to put chilli, sago or cloves in a museum? It's so mundane, so boring. We can at least try through art. Asia's maritime trading world was snuffed out by the late 1600s (Asia paid for that Rembrandt). Or maybe it was just a temporary interruption? 10/11 kr

I've often marvelled at how Malaysians love to travel, and emigrate. This is probably true for every country but I believe there is a distinct openness and lack of fear. I think it's because we know that we have all been there before. @kamraslan 11/11 kr