The British Museum has announced that architect Lina Ghotmeh will lead the renovation of the Western Range galleries, a huge area of 15,650 square metres that amounts to one third of the museum’s overall gallery space. Initial designs for the space will now be developed, with the aim of being ready by mid-2026.
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The British Museum will be receiving a gift valued at around £1 billion, the highest value gift any UK museum has ever received. The Trustees of the Sir Percival David Foundation have announced that they will be donating around 1,700 Chinese ceramics to the London museum, who will now have the largest and most significant public collection of Chinese ceramics outside of the Chinese speaking country.
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The British Museum have announced that the eight-year leadership of Hartwig Fischer will come to an end in 2024. As of this autumn, the London institution will be looking for a new director.
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The British Museum has been accused of copyright infringement by a Vancouver-based poet and translator, Yilin Wang. Wang has claimed that they did not receive any credit of reimbursement when their translations of poetry by Qiu Jin (1875-1907) were used in the museum’s exhibition ‘China’s Hidden Century’, which opened on 18 May 2023 and is due to close on 8 October.
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Michelle Donelan, the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, has announced the Parthenon Marbles “belong here in the UK“. Despite reports suggesting the British Museum is close to agreeing a deal with Greece, Donelan insisted that the ancient sculptures should not be returned.
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Pressure is mounting on the British Museum to return the celebrated Parthenon marbles to Greece as a convincing life-size replica made by a robot goes on display in London. Over the years, the British and Greek governments have hotly disputed the ownership of the marbles, which were removed by the British from Athens between 1801 and 1805.
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The repatriation of the ‘Elgin Marbles’ in the British Museum back to the Acropolis in Athens has been the subject of official debate for nearly forty years, since Greece first put in a request for the objects to be returned in 1983. Now, only a year after UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson firmly reiterated that they would not be returned, UNESCO has announced that both the U.K. and Greece have agreed to hold formal talks about the status of the marbles.
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During Pride Month, the British Museum has announced the permanent display of five objects that will look back at LGBTQ+ history through the ages. The little-known gay history of one of the most famous objects in the world, the Rosetta Stone, will now be included in the museum’s LGBTQ+ tours too.
The British Museum could lose its marbles over Brexit, following the announcement of a controversial draft document that details a potential trade deal with the EU.
One of the “most astonishing” and obscure watercolours by Dante Gabriel Rossetti will go on public display at the British Museum this week. Continue reading
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