I MISS YOU
In the organizer's words:
The RJM not only preserves everyday objects from the Global South, but also countless ritual, religious and sacred objects. They protect, they help to alleviate pain and anxiety, they accompany mourning for loved ones who have died and prevent them from being forgotten. But they also commemorate important historical and political moments such as coronations, wars and disasters. All these objects, which the museum preserves here, are memories of individual and collective destinies.
I MISS YOU is a series of exhibitions about missing, giving back and remembering. It is about objects that have been in the museum for a long time and which we now see in a different light. What do they tell us? What history do they conceal - from where, from when and about whom? Who made them? Who loved and honored them? Who lost them? Who misses them? And why are they part of the debate on restitution and colonial reappraisal today?
In the context of the current nationwide negotiations on the transfer of ownership and restitution to Nigeria of the court artworks looted by British soldiers from the Kingdom of Benin in 1897, the RJM, which holds the fourth largest collection in Germany, is focusing intensively on this history. For the first time ever, the RJM presented its total of 96 Benin court artworks in 2021 in the special exhibition RESIST! The Art of Resistance. In I MISS YOU, each of the 96 works is now staged in its special individuality and not only their beauty is shown, but also the pain, loss and grief associated with them is remembered.
At the height of the colonial wars on the African continent, when Europe was trying to subjugate the people of Africa, these 96 Benin court artworks were violently looted from the palace of the Kingdom of Benin by British soldiers in 1897, along with thousands of others. The history of these works makes painful reading. Dethroned, uprooted, removed and desecrated, these important repositories of memory - the material archive of the 500-year-old kingdom - have since been scattered around the world in European and American museums. This is the tragic story of these works, and it is around them that the debates about restitution revolve today.
The RJM's court artworks are fragments of local and global, forgotten, repressed and interwoven events about which only fragmentary knowledge exists. I MISS YOU is therefore a project that gradually expands through a wide variety of narratives about missing and remembering cultural assets looted during the colonial era, both in analog and digital space. It is about broken memories, colonial phantom pains and traumas caused by the colonial legacies of devastation and dispossession that have been passed down through generations. The trauma even affects those born long after 1960, Nigeria's independence from the colonial power of Great Britain, both in Nigeria and in the diaspora in Germany and here in Cologne.
With I MISS YOU, the RJM opens its doors for collaboration with descendants, experts and institutions in Nigeria and the Nigerian diaspora in NRW to make them themselves a speaking part of this debate about their cultural heritage that is being preserved in Cologne.
I MISS YOU offers people the space to meet and engage with this long and complex history of Benin court artworks, which is about much more than restitution alone. Here, the buried memories of loss can be reactivated. I MISS YOU is an attempt to transform absence into presence. I MISS YOU is a platform for mourning, for an ongoing and never-ending process of healing colonial rifts in our society. What could it mean for museums to become active players in the "global repair" of transgenerationally passed on colonial traumas?
This content has been machine translated.Location
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