Final report on my participation in the British Museum’s International Training

Programme 2015

Bahra Salih Abdulrahman

Archaeologist, Slemani Museum, Kurdistani

Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Charitable Trust Fellow

In my opinion the ITP is like a specific college for further learning about different aspects of life,

such as making friendships with people from different societies, different countries, different

languages, different religions and different cultures. While we are different in those things, we

can live together, we can work together and help each other developing our work and museums,

as well as museums around the world.

The ITP is helping me to help my museums develop

It would be difficult to say I will change my museum like British Museum in one or two years.

But after attending a varied programme during the ITP, it inspired me to gain new ideas and new

experiences for different aspects of my museum. I will try to change and develop things in my

museum as much as I can.

For example I learned how we can make some programmes for children in our museum to

encourage families to visit the museum and bring their children, and to understand the

importance of the museum and enjoy their time there.

One of the other very important sessions for me was the session about international loans. It was

helpful to me as I am thinking about borrowing some famous pieces from other museums inside

or outside the country to display in our museum. For example, a loan of some mummies from

Egyptian museums will be fabulous for our museum in terms of attracting visitors. Also this

session helped me to learn more about how we deal with the objects we send to other museums

or institutions, when they ask us about sending archaeological pieces as loans.

My time with the Middle East department

I spend some days with the Middle East department’s staff and saw some interesting work. The

time was helpful to us, especially with Dr Zeina Klink Hoppe as she also helped us to visit the

Ashmolean Museum of Art & Archaeology, Oxford and many nice places in the city. The

Ashmolean was a nice and interesting museum: I saw many galleries that inspired me to take

many ideas about how to make exhibitions in different ways. Because they have a large

collection from Mesopotamia it was helpful to me due to that similarity with our own collection.

Also many curators’ lectures were interesting to me, especially one day where we had a lecture

about “Giving Gallery Talks”. For me it was one of the most practical lectures – Sally Fletcher

gave us many theories and intention plans about how we give Gallery talks to museum visitors.

And now when I am giving gallery talks in my museum I practice those things.

Day Trips

This was one of the most interesting parts of the ITP. It gave us more opportunity to spend more

time together as a group and we exchanged some ideas about our museums and our archeological

sites. And we saw many nice museums and art galleries outside of London - they were all

interesting. For instance visiting Stonehenge personally inspired me for thinking about our

archeological sites. Because we have many famous and important ancient sites. If we do some

tourism services for those sites like for Stonehenge, they will be one of the very important

economic sources for our country in future. Also we can introduce our archeological sites and

our history to those visitors who come to Kurdistan.

10 days at my UK Partner Museum

I had the opportunity to spend 10 ten days in Birmingham Museums and Art Galleries. It was a

good chance to see another museum smaller than the British Museum, also it is more close to my

museum. We saw how they work in those kind of museums which are not very big like the

British Museum: we saw the storage department and how they organized their collection in

storage, we discussed many ideas and knowledge with curators about the museum and collection.

I am using some ideas of museum storage with my colleagues. We saw all galleries and

exhibitions. The Birmingham museums staff were very helpful with us especially Mr. Adam

Jaffer. He showed us many galleries and museums inside and outside of Birmingham.

Our activity during the ITP

We had many activities during our ITP programme: those activities were helping us to learn

more about each other, to introduce our museums and our work to each other. For example we

had a presentation about our museums - it was an interesting day and I gained a lot of knowledge

about different museums around the world. All participants gave me many new theories about

museums. I feel like I was visiting those entire museums in one day.

During the Programme we had many discussions and activities. I am proud of one activity I had

with some of my friends about the destruction of Mosul Museum by ISIS terrorists. And we

explained: Why they did that and what they did. And what is the solution?

Explanation about distraction of mussel museum by ISIS terrorist.

Final Exhibition Proposal

It was one of very interesting parts of the Programme: we learned how to make a proposal for a

new exhibition. We prepared successful proposals, we learned many new things about making an

exhibition and how to work as a group to plan for new exhibitions.

Final exhibition - 3 September 2015, Cylinder Seal

What I am doing after the ITP?

I gave some lectures about how we can save our archeological collection and sites for some

relative organizations and government officials who have connections with museums.

Archaeological Educational course to Sulaimaniyah International Airports staff

In the end of this report I want to say that it is difficult talk about everything and all the

information I got through the ITP, I have just written some of this.

I want to say thanks a lot to everyone in the ITP team, as they were very helpful with us. Also to

those people who gave us different talks about the work of the British museum - they were so

interesting for us so thanks a lot to all of them. And for all of my friends in ITP - they are all

wonderful people, we spent a nice time together, we built nice friendships with each other and I

hope a successful bright future for every one of them. And I hope one day we can see each other

again and work together.

And finally, I wanted to thank the Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Charitable Trust for making my

visit possible.

In Slemani Museum