Benin bronzes: Hamburg exhibits them one last time before returning them – culture

Orphaned museums, re-nationalization of human heritage, indulgences: the opponents of the restitution of stolen works of art from Europe’s colonies predict bad things if the returns are really taken seriously.

Hamburg is now serious. On Thursday, Senator for Culture Carsten Brosda surprisingly announced that Museum am Rothenbaum (MARKK) will transfer ownership of all 179 Benin objects in his collection to Nigeria in the coming year. In the spring, the federal government and the states with the largest Benin holdings had only promised “substantial returns”.

But in the “farewell exhibition” (as director Barbara Plankensteiner put it), which the museum is now organizing for its Benin collection, there is no trace of the return pain. The small show, which was organized under high pressure to keep pace with political developments, seems more lively and liberated than anything that has been seen in ethnological museums in recent years. It is as if a load weighing tons has been dropped from curators and objects.

All bronzes come from a single raid by the British – the fall of the Benin Empire

The Benin bronzes have been considered the most outstanding works of African art since their “discovery”. Especially for Europeans, for whom the stylized naturalism of the famous commemorative heads made them think of the Roman and Greek art of antiquity. They became icons of the restitution debate because almost all of the 3,000 to 5,000 Benin works that are located outside Nigeria – 1,200 of them in German museums – come from a single, well-documented raid, the bloody retaliation campaign with which the British came to terms in 1897 to avenge a raid on their colonial troops. With overwhelming force they took the capital of the Benin Empire, killed between 10,000 and 50,000 people and looted the palace. It was the end of the kingdom. And unlike many other works from Europe’s former colonies, Nigeria, in whose territory the old royal city of Benin City is located, has been demanding the bronzes back since the 1970s.

So far, most museums have only mentioned this theft in shameful footnotes, if at all. Then the term “punitive expedition” was always used, further details were usually spared for themselves and the audience. How else could the works have been shown?

In Hamburg, it was to be expected, the looting would now be the focus. But you are not one, but two steps further. Instead of showing many pictures of the British robbers in their mountains of looted property, instead of telling the story of the cynical military operation carried out under sustained fire from the first “Maxim” machine guns, financed with stolen ivory, the exhibition considers all of this to be known and indisputable in advance. Instead, the makers concentrate on what they have to show themselves, what will soon no longer belong to them and what is given an amazing new relevance and liveliness in this actually abstract transfer process.

Open detailed view

The fact that they no longer have to hide the origin of the pieces has inspired the curators to be honest. You could have staged an exhibition with the “masterpieces of Benin art”, as was done in the past, you could have impressed people once again with the outstanding quality, the grandeur of these works. Instead, they all show 179 of them as if they were taking an inventory, from the ornate memorial heads with which deceased kings were honored, to the relief panels that depict courtly scenes like three-dimensional comics, to a cracked shell and a rusty sword. They are now not only stepping back from these objects for which they are no longer responsible, they are also distancing themselves from their predecessors and their “greed and collecting mania”, as Plankensteiner calls it. It’s an exhibition about the culture of Benin, but also an exhibition about German ethnology.

Even ethnologists sometimes remain alien to foreign cultures. The exhibition does not hide that

Unlike many other Africa collections with their hundreds of arrows and dozen of drums, the Hamburg Benin Collection is free of redundancies. It becomes particularly interesting at the edges, with the objects that would have been sorted out earlier. There is, for example, a large brass bowl that does not come from Benin at all, but from Nuremberg: the foundries in Benin obtained most of their raw material from Europe, in exchange for pepper and for slaves.

Open detailed view

Or two somewhat clumsy brass crosses, which indicate the missionary work, for whose symbols the familiar material was used. And there is the key to a palace door, shaped after a strangely misunderstood European model. The relations of this supposedly isolated culture to Europe and Asia were much closer than one long wanted to admit.

But now you can also see examples of the limits of ethnology. As she says, one of Barbara Plankensteiner’s predecessors had worked on that damaged brass bowl for years without being able to determine its purpose and its origin. It is now on display anyway, as evidence that even ethnologists foreign cultures sometimes remain foreign and epistemological wrong turns can never be ruled out. For the same reason, the exhibition’s team of curators and researchers also included several scientists from Benin.

At the opening of the exhibition, Brosda, Plankensteiner and Abba Isa Tijani were repeatedly asked by the Nigerian Museum and Monument Commission whether Nigeria would withdraw everything as soon as it officially became the owner of the collection. “If the Nigerian side so wishes, they can of course do so,” replied Plankensteiner with mock coolness, as if she hoped the little shock would help the audience understand the historical significance of the Hamburg decision. But immediately afterwards she gave Tijani the all-clear with a smile. That is very unlikely. The architect who was entrusted with it, David Adjaye, has not even started building the planned museum. And Tijani smiled too. First of all, only one thing counts: Now you can really work together.

Benin. Stolen history. Museum am Rothenbaum, Hamburg. Until the collection is returned at the end of 2022. The catalog will appear next year.