Restitution in Motion

Paying a Visit to the Queen - Tracing Dispersion, Looking for Disappearance
bellu&bellu, Berlin 2016, 11 min. English with English subtitles

Hands of Inge
John W. Fletcher, USA 1962, 11 min. English

Statues Hardly Ever Smile
Stan Lathan, USA 1971, 21 min. English

Et les chiens se taisaient (And the dogs fell silent)
Sarah Maldoror, France 1978, 13 min. French with English subtitles

You Hide Me
 Nii Kwate Owoo, Ghana, Great Britain 1970, 17 min. English

Introduction by Jeanne-Ange Wagne, followed by a conversation with Memory Biwa

This program visits several Western ethnological museums and includes critiques, claims and methods of restitution. Paying a Visit to the Queen accompanies the almost whispered dialog of two activists on their 2nd visit to the Benin Collection at the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin: a moment of resistance while omitting the institutional voice. Hands of Inge presents the craft of sculptor Ruth Inge Hardison. In Statues Hardly Ever Smile, at the Brooklyn Museum young students create a dance piece addressing the relationship between the museum and its neighborhood. Based on the poem of the same name by Aimée Césair, Et les chiens se taisaient interprets the entanglement between violent European colonialism and looted art in Western museums in the depot of the Musée de l'Homme. You Hide Me shows the extent of the theft and hierarchization of African artifacts and calls for comprehensive restitution. (FH)

Jeanne-Ange Wagne is an art historian, knowledge mediator and event curator who conducts artistic research into memory, colonial provenance research and trend cycles in art, culture and fashion.

Memory Biwa is a historian, and artist. Her research addresses anti-colonial resistance, genocide, memory and reparative processes in Namibia. Biwa’s practice interweaves aurality, historical production, and geographies.