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Social Movements · 2022

Benin Bronzes Returned

4
Years ago
0
Movements active
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Artists working
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Works dated 2019–2025

Germany, the UK, and US institutions began returning Benin Bronzes looted in the 1897 British Punitive Expedition, triggering a cascade of decolonization debates across every major Western museum collection. The repatriation movement reframes the entire canon question: whose objects, whose history, whose walls.

Sources

Lead image of the Wikipedia article, via Wikimedia Commons
Benin Bronzes Returned (2022) · Ellsworth