Rhea Tuli Partridge

Rhea’s research interrogates the colonial legacies of museum and heritage collections, with a particular focus on the Clive Collection at Powis Castle (National Trust). She examines the role of absence and presence in heritage-making, institutional practice and provenance research. Her work develops lut, a conceptual and methodological tool derived from the Hindi word lut gaya, meaning ‘lost’. Lut articulates forms of absence that are buried yet recoverable and offers a method for retrieving what is lost in the provenance of colonial collections: an object’s dialectical assemblages and dialogic voices. By tracing the diverse and shifting meanings of objects in the Clive Collection across their overlapping life histories in South Asia and Britain, her research surfaces the multiple, contradictory and ambiguous strands of provenance. This process generates productive conflict, which paradoxically creates dynamic pathways for rethinking the futures of colonial collections.