Panggah Ardiyansyah is a PhD candidate of History of Art and Archaeology at SOAS University of London. His research focuses on the afterlives of Hindu-Buddhist materials in premodern Indonesia, a project which aims to contribute to decolonising the field of Indonesian art history and archaeology. In particular, the work aims to deconstruct the rigid categorisation opposing the classical period and the subsequent Islamic artistic tradition and to reconstruct the long history of ancient Hindu-Buddhist materials across times and cultures in probing appropriations, transactions, and reconfigurations. Prior to doctoral project, he has spent more than a decade working professionally as a heritage educator for Borobudur Temple in Magelang, Indonesia, where he was responsible to design and implement guided tours and travelling exhibitions. In 2021, he co-edited a volume entitled Returning Southeast Asia’s Past: Objects, Museums, and Restitution. This volume explores the lives of artefacts which have been repatriated from the West to museums in Southeast Asia and is the first edited volume entirely devoted to object restitution to this region. In 2022, he worked as a consultant for the British Institute for International and Comparative Law’s project entitled “Beyond Restitution: Exploring the Story of Cultural Objects After Their Repatriation”. For this project, he investigated the afterlives of materials returned to Indonesia, including the much-coveted Diponegoro kris returned by the Netherlands and religious objects donated to Nias Heritage Museum from abroad. 

As a member of Academic Team of CO-OP, he is keen to productively think and collaboratively generate discourses in and around Restitution beyond modern nation-state borders as well as “East-West” binary. He considers the CO-OP project as an opportunity to draw special attention to localised knowledge pertaining objects’ distribution, reproduction, and appropriation within Southeast Asian frameworks.