Robert-Goldwater-Library

The Inaugural Conference on the Inclusive Museum

Reblogged from Material World (with props to Haidy):

                                                                                   

National Museum of Ethnology, Leiden, the Netherlands, 8-11 June 2008
http://www.Museum-Conference.com

At this time of fundamental social change, what is the role of the museum, both as a creature of that change, and perhaps also as an agent of change? The International Conference on the Inclusive Museum is a place where museum practitioners, researchers, thinkers and teachers can engage in discussion on the historic character and future shape of the museum. The key question of the Conference is 'How can the institution of the museum become more inclusive?'

As well as impressive line-up of international main speakers, the Conference will also include numerous paper, workshop and colloquium presentations by practitioners, teachers and researchers. We would particularly like to invite you to respond to the Conference Call-for-Papers. Presenters may choose to submit written papers for publication in the fully refereed International Journal of the Inclusive Museum. If you are unable to attend the Conference in person, virtual registrations are also available which allow you to submit a paper for refereeing and possible publication in this fully refereed academic Journal, as well as access to the electronic version of the Conference proceedings.

The deadline for the next round in the call for papers (a title and short abstract) is 8 November 2007. Proposals are reviewed within four weeks of submission. Full details of the Conference, including an online proposal submission form, are to be found at the Conference website.

Apart from the web site, there will also be a conference journal, The International Journal of the Inclusive Museum, and an electronic Newsletter (sign up here),

'Eternal Ancestors' Reviewed in the New York Times

A reliquary sculpture in the exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The piece, sometimes called the Black Venus, is by a Fang artist from what is now Gabon.

Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art

via NYTimes, additional links courtesy of RGL:

'Eternal Ancestors'
Keeping Watch Over the Dead
By HOLLAND COTTER
Published: October 5, 2007

Is she an infant, a wrestler, a goddess or what? Sunk in thought or entranced by sounds only she can hear? Her flawless skin is dark but glows. Her body is organic but abstract, with seeds for eyes, succulents for arms, and mushroomlike shoulders melting into breasts. In the perfect sleek globe of her head, her face is a scooped-out heart.

You'll find this  stunner, beaming with ambiguity, in "Eternal Ancestors: The Art of the Central African Reliquary" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She was carved in the 19th century by a Fang artist in what is now Gabon. Sometimes referred to as the Black Venus, she resides in Paris today. And she's just one of many magnetic images in a gorgeous, morally and spiritually vibrant show that is sure be one of the sleepers of the fall art season.

Why, with such attractions, is it a sleeper? Because exhibitions of African art almost always are. Even when museums give them the luxury treatment, as the Met does here, they remain on the fringes of our awareness, in a compartment labeled esoteric, as we make our beelines to Rembrandts and Rothkos. We are the sleepers, somnambulating past extraordinary things,

So, sleepers, awake. Change your habits, alter your route, see what you’re missing. This African show isn’t esoteric at all. Anyone familiar with Western religious art, particularly art before the modern era, will recognize its basic theme: life as a cosmic journey homeward, with parental spirits, embodied in materials and images, coddling, counseling and chiding us every step of the way.

Multimedia: Slide Show

 

The opening gallery is about connecting cross-cultural dots. First, and splendidly, we get Africa, in a sculptural group from Cameroon with two figures — the head of one explodes with feathers — perched atop a bark container that once held the skulls of generations of men from a single family.

A reliquary bust of Saint Yrieix.

Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art

Next is Europe, represented by a 13th-century silver bust designed to encase the cranium of a Roman Catholic saint. Then Asia, in a miniature version of an Indian Buddhist stupa mound that in its monumental form might have held the bones of Buddha himself. The lesson: When it comes to venerating the earthly traces of the honored dead, very different cultures share common ground.

Apparently not common enough, though, to let museum audiences easily embrace African art on its own terms. Western Modernism has seen to that. Through much of the 20th century, African art was valued primarily as source material for a European avant-garde. You know the story: Picasso sees an African mask  —  it doesn't matter which one  —  and, presto, there’s Cubism, an art that really counts.

Alisa LaGamma, the Met curator who organized "Eternal Ancestors," acknowledges the real investment that Modernism had in African culture. Several of the show’s most beautiful items have an early-20th-century art world pedigree. A spectacular Fang reliquary figure, combative and unflinching, once belonged to the painter André Derain. (The Met owns it now.) A jocund Kwele mask from Gabon was prized by the Dada poet Tristan Tzara.

But Ms. LaGamma also makes it clear that "Eternal Ancestors" is based on a non-Eurocentric, postmodern model. It is intended, as far as is ever possible in a Western museum, especially one as staid as the Met, to offer a view of traditional African art as it might have been seen through African eyes.

This approach is distilled in a small, enclosed space that is set apart for the display of three ancestral shrines and accompanied by wall labels of a kind seldom found in mainstream museums. It reads: "This room is devoted to a series of intact shrines. Upon entering, we request that you show respect for these devotional works."

Whatever devotion may mean to you, chances are that once you read those words, the atmosphere in the space will feel, however subtly, charged, the objects alive and purposeful, awake. So they would have been for the people who created and lived with them, and who valued them at least as much for what they concealed as for what they revealed.

All three shrines consist of alluring figures set atop, or emerging from, receptacles of some kind. Two of the figures are Fang in origin, similar in style to the Venus. The third, all face and spindly legs, was made by a Kota artist from thin strips of light-reflective copper laid over a forked wood frame.

What's hidden is the contents of the shrines' containers: bones, ashes, bits of cloth or earth. These materials are associated with people who died but are considered to be still present through their earthly remains in the lives of their descendants.

To the original owners of the shrine, its value lay in these relics, not in the replaceable sculptures that safeguarded them. To the late-19th-century European colonialists who first collected many of the works in this show, notable for its wealth of important international loans, the sculptures meant everything, the relics nothing. Usually they were just tossed away. The three intact shrines at the Met are rare survivals.

Yet sculpture is, of course, the visual substance of this show. And once Ms. LaGamma has suggested the life-and-death concepts that animate it, this is what we see: a symphonic sweep of reliquary forms and traditions from across Central Africa. From Cameroon comes a carving of a crotchety-looking, bent-kneed man with a cap — or is it coiffure? — balanced on his head like a meringue. This figure is a commemorative portrait of a Bangwa chief named Fosia, carved by the artist Ateu Atsa (around 1840-1910). Commissioned during the chief’s lifetime, it would have stood sentinel over his skull after death.

Full-length Fang figures, taut as clenched fists, are among Africa's most familiar sculptural types, although bust-length Fang heads, also meant to top reliquary containers, are no less gripping. One of the most famous, visiting from the Ethnographic Museum in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, is in the show. Its round, mirrored eyes give it a look of blank astonishment; the palm oil with which the wood was once saturated still oozes and drips from its surface like blood, or sweat, or tears.

An early-20th-century female figure from Congo made of fiber, cane and pigment.

Photo: Metroplitan Museum of Art

Then, a coup de théâtre: an ensemble of dozens of Kota reliquary figures, their shovel-shape faces made of gleaming copper and brass. Ganged together, side by side in rows of display cases, they are the visual equivalent of a brass choir at full volume, a Corelli fanfare. Yet each piece, whether as smooth as a leaf or dense with ornamentation, is unlike any other.

The show ends theatrically too, though whether with tragedy or comedy is hard to say. One of the final images is also one of the most startling: a reliquary figure from Congo. Standing six feet tall and made from layers and layers of cloth, including red European blankets, the figure is bulked up to resemble a giant female doll, all but nude, with brick-red skin and a smile of what looks like avid glee on her face.

Who is she? What is she? Several things. She is a portrait of someone who has died and also a receptacle for that person's mummified body. She is an image of a specific category of ancestor, one recently dead. But she will fully claim status only after she has been buried with the relic she holds.

There's a remarkable short 1926 film of such a burial playing in the gallery, and the mood of the occasion is hard to gauge. A titanic soft sculpture, like the one in the show, is being carried by a crowd out of the village. The procession stops beside a trench-size open grave. The villagers try to slide, then tip the figure into the ground, but it keeps bobbing back upright, like a Macy's Thanksgiving Day balloon that refuses to be held down. At this point, with the struggle still in progress, the film stops.

The point of such burials is symbolic: The dead enter the ancestral realm below the earth, from which they will return, transformed, to attend the living, who will themselves become ancestors. That, at least, is the idea, although as enacted here it has an antic, clownish air, more carnival than funeral. The lesson: In death, as in life, ambiguity rules. The second lesson: When treated like the living thing it is, art has a mind of its own.

 

Latest in Aboriginal Art Flap: Carpet-Bagging?

Journalists say that Tommy Watson has been duped out of thousands of dollars on the sale of works such as Pitjantjatjara, 2005 - claims the Red Sand Art Gallery denies



via The Art Newspaper; additional links courtesy of RGL:

Aboriginal art dealers fight back
Red Sand Art Gallery sues journalists who accuse them of defrauding indigenous artists
James MacDonald | 9.10.07 | Issue 184

In mid July in the massive modernist Supreme Court in Darwin, a frail Aboriginal man with a shock of grizzled white hair and beard took the witness stand to give evidence in a case that goes to the heart of alleged "carpet-bagging"-dealers exploiting indigenous artists to make a profit-in the country's booming indigenous art trade.

Tommy Watson , who only began painting five years ago, is one of the new stars of the Aboriginal art world; his 2006 work Waltitjatta sold for A$240,000 ($197,160) at a sale in May held by Lawson Menzies auctioneers in Sydney-an ­auction that also saw the first Aboriginal painting break the A$1m ($840,000) price barrier, the late Emily Kame Kngwarreye's Earth's Creation.

Watson is also one of eight indigenous artists from Australia whose work is included in the Musée du Quai Branly, the new museum in Paris dedicated
to the arts and civilisations of Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas.
The case has been brought to the Northern Territory Supreme Court by Red Sand Art Gallery and its proprietors Peter and Nathan King, who are seeking damages for alleged defamation in two magazine articles.

According to their counsel, Paul Heyward-Smith QC, the articles invited ­readers to consider them as "carpet-baggers" exploiting Watson.

The defendants are Alison Harper, a former director of what was then Phillips Fine Art in Australia, who publishes the quarterly Australian Art Market Report, and journalist Jeremy Eccles, who wrote two articles in Harper's magazine in late 2005 and early 2006.

The defendants claim truth, fair comment and qualified privilege.

Tommy Watson was appearing as a witness for the defendants. Born around 1935 in the desert of central Australia, Watson cannot read or write, and speaks only a smattering of English.

He moves between Irrunytya, a small community of 150 people described as "one of the most impoverished places on earth" and the town of Alice Springs, a day's drive away.

Speaking through an interpreter in his native Pitjantjatjara language, Watson told the court of his dealings with the Red Sand Art Gallery in Alice Springs in 2005 when his paintings started attracting attention from collectors.

"I brought a lot of paintings in and I gave [them] to some mob and they didn't pay me," he said.

Watson supplied the gallery with 41 paintings over four months, but how much money changed hands and how it was distributed is still to be established.

Legal searches found that Watson's niece had received A$61,000 ($50,100) in cash and second-hand cars on his behalf, and the gallery later showed the court receipts showing that it had paid a further A$11,000 ($9,200) for used vehicles.

At the time his paintings were selling for over A$30,000 ($24,650) each.

The gallery began ­placing the works with auction houses in Sydney and Melbourne; to date they have realised A$347,300 ($285,300) for 20 works sold so far and are likely to make around A$844,700 ($693,920) when all are auctioned, according to Adrian Newstead, head of indigenous art at Lawson Menzies. [read on...]

Aboriginal art under threat

Concern … Harriet Fesq, co-ordinator of the Durrmu Arts centre, with some of the art at the Chalkhorse Gallery in Surry Hills.
Photo: Adam Mclean

from The Sydney Morning Herald, via Harvard Law School Art Law resources [links courtesy of RGL]:

Aboriginal art under threat
Stephanie Peatling and Joel Gibson
September 17, 2007

THE [Australian] Federal Government's intervention in remote indigenous communities in the Northern Territory could devastate a lucrative industry and leave artists open to exploitation by carpet-baggers, leading indigenous art academics and artists' representatives say.

They want to keep the Community Development Employment Project, which is being scrapped as part of the intervention, because the industry depends on it to support art centres and workers who do not earn enough to live on from inconsistent art sales.

Jon Altman, the director of the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research at the Australian National University, said ending the program was likely to "jeopardise" the most successful indigenous industry.

"Why would you undermine the most robust sector? [Art] is a huge drawcard for international tourists and has enormous spin-off benefits for the nation," Professor Altman said.

As part of the intervention into Northern Territory remote communities, indigenous people will have up to half of their welfare payments quarantined by the Federal Government.

But employment project payments cannot be quarantined because they are technically income. People receiving these payments will be moved to the lower unemployment payments, which are subject to quarantining, and receive top-ups to cover the difference.

The Minister for Workforce Participation, Sharman Stone, told the Herald all art centres in the Northern Territory would be visited by departmental staff to see if some of their staff could be employed by the public service.

"If there are artists who are able to sell their work and they are doing well they should be self-sufficient and they should be assisted to manage their income," Dr Stone said.

Richard Birrinbirrin, a Ramingining artist and one of the producers of the AFI-award-winning film Ten Canoes, said: "Nearly all of our art centre workers and artists rely on CDEP payments, which have supported jobs in art centres for the past 20 years. Due to years of under-funding of indigenous education, many of our people are not job-ready and some never will be. They do have meaningful work, though: their job is the expression and teaching of our culture. They are artists."

Alan Murn, the manager of Julalikari Arts, said that moving artists to the work-for-the-dole scheme would require them to perform menial jobs such as cleaning communities instead of painting, and would reduce their base pay rate, making them more vulnerable to carpet-baggers.

Professor Altman agreed, saying that if artists were working in other areas as part of the work-for-the-dole scheme they would be susceptible to carpet-baggers coming into communities and offering cash for artworks.

A recent Senate report on the indigenous art industry warned about carpet-baggers, finding it was common practice for Aboriginal artists to be offered small amounts of instant cash for their paintings, much less than they would receive if the paintings were sold through an art centre or gallery.

Harriet Fesq, co-ordinator of the Durrmu Arts centre in Peppimenarti, said that community was protected from carpet-baggers by its remoteness but the end of employment project payments would affect the industry across the Territory.

"It's a fragile thing, having an art program and ensuring the artists are happy and comfortable so they can produce good work."

Archaeology magazine, Sept./Oct. 2007

Selected features of interest in the September/October 2007 issue:

• From the President: Common Ground: Can archaeologists and museums work together?, by C. Brian Rose
• Destination: We asked pioneering archaeoastronomer Anthony Aveni of Colgate University to name his favorite overlooked site
• Feature: A tangled journey home: Priceless artifacts return to Italy and Greece, but their histories remain lost, by Eti Bonn-Muller and Eric A. Powell.
• Museums: Ancient Americans (The Field Museum)
• Insider: The once and future Maya, by David Freidel [online version is an abstract]
• Letter from Peru: Mystery circles of the Andes, by Roger Atwood [online version is an abstract]

Yale Bingham collection dispute yields an agreement

From the Hartford Courant, August 14, 2007, via Archaeologymagazine.com

Yale Will Give Peru A List Of Artifacts
Move May Ease Dispute Over Machu Picchu Discoveries
By KIM MARTINEAU

Yale has agreed to turn over to Peru an inventory of artifacts that explorer Hiram Bingham III carted back with him to New Haven after excavating Machu Picchu, the "lost" city of the Incas, in the Andean mountains nearly a century ago.

The breakthrough, which may ultimately help decide who gets to keep the ancient Incan artifacts, was reached this summer under Peru's new president, who appears willing to settle the dispute without resorting to the lawsuit threatened by his predecessor.

Peru's housing minister is expected to lead a delegation of Peruvians to New Haven next month to continue talks with Yale.

"Why should we pursue a lawsuit?" said Vladimír Kocerha, a spokesman for the Peruvian Embassy in Washington, D.C. "Things are progressing. We are talking to them. They are talking to us."

• Read more of the story

Funerary sculpture to return to Kenya

Brooke Allen and Peter Ogego, Kenyan ambassador to the United States, at yesterday’s ceremony returning nine statues.

From the NY Times, June 26, 2007 (with correction):

9 Statues Uprooted From Africa Head Home
by ROBIN POGREBIN

For some two decades the nine carved statues were displayed in the Park Avenue apartment of the producer Lewis M. Allen and the screenwriter Jay Presson Allen. Tall and slender with rounded heads, the postlike figures seemed more like exotic conversation pieces than relics with a religious purpose, the Allens’ daughter, the writer Brooke Allen, recalls.

Yesterday all nine wooden statues were formally handed over to the Kenyan government in a ceremony at the United Nations. Eventually they will go on display at the Nairobi Museum.

Ranging from four to six feet tall, the objects, known as vigango, were looted in recent decades from the burial sites of the rural Mijikenda people on the Kenyan coast. Such figures are carved and posted at the graves of high-ranking members of a secret society called the Gohu, and the Mijikenda believe that bad luck will ensue if they are removed.

Alerted to their significance recently, Ms. Allen, the couple’s heir, decided that they should go back to Kenya.

“I spent a lot of time in Africa during my younger years, and I feel it gave me so much,” Ms. Allen said in an interview. “I feel very strongly about these things being returned.”

Asked whether her parents had been aware of their significance, she said, “I don’t think they knew.” Nor could she recall how they purchased the statues, although she estimated that it was in the early 1980s and said she doubted that her parents paid much for them.

Valued at $10,000 each today on the open market, vigango have often been looted from graveyards in Kenya, making their way into collections in the United States and Europe. Experts estimate that at least 400 are held in the collections of individuals and museums, including at least 19 museums in the United States alone.

Dispute continues over Bingham's Machu Picchu finds

In case you missed it the Sunday New York Times magazine's cover story, "The Possessed", chronicles the ongoing dispute between Yale University and the government of Peru over the disposition of archaeological materials excavated by Hiram Bingham in the early twentieth century.

Author Arthur Lubow profiles the many colorful parties to the dispute: Hiram Bingham III, the "imposingly tall and strong-minded" adventurer whose original promises to the Peruvian government are still not entirely clear; Richard Burger, professor of anthropology at Yale University, and his wife Lucy Salazar, ambassadors and negotiators for the university; Eliane Karp-Toledo, European-born wife of former Peruvian president Alejandro Toledo, "a slim woman with long, wavy reddish blond hair and a fondness for fashionable versions of Andean woolens and ethnic jewelry"; Luis Lumbreras, "charismatic Marxist ... specialist on pre-Inca Peruvian cultures" with an unfortunate blot on his copy book; and Terry Garcia, executive vice-president of the National Geographic Society, caught between two unyielding institutions while trying to protect his own against potentially damaging blow-back.

All in all the stuff of a thoroughly engrossing telenovela.

PHOTO: The Explorer at Rest Hiram Bingham III, in his tent in 1912 after completing a season’s excavation. The final disposition of what he dug up remains in dispute. (Hiram Bingham, copyright © 2007 National Geographic)

A New World: England's first view of America

via The British Museum site:

A New World: England's first view of America
15 March – 17 June 2007
Room 5

'Staggering' The Times

'Enthralling...unmissable' The Telegraph

The extraordinary watercolours of John White gave the Elizabethan world its first glimpse of America, ultimately shaping its view of the New World. This exhibition focuses on more than 70 watercolours made by White on the voyages to Virginia (now North Carolina) in the 1580s. These images are  the earliest visual record by an Englishman of the flora, fauna and people of America and provide us with an idea of how fascinating this strange New World must have been to Europeans of the late 16th century.
      
The exhibition also features a selection of Elizabethan portraits, maritime and scientific instruments from the period, alongside historic maps, books, prints and other exquisite objects which relate to Elizabethan navigation and capture the excitement of this golden age of exploration.
      
A New World looks at the lasting impact John White's watercolours had on the Old World's impression of America. His legacy continued for over 250 years after his death thanks to the reproduction and adaptation of his work by later artists, a selection of which is displayed in the exhibition.
      
Exhibition supported by The Annenberg Foundation.       
      
Generous support was also provided by the American Friends of the British Museum and Mr Francis Finlay.

via Time Out, Mon Mar 12, 2007:

A New World: England's First View of America
by Sara O'Reilly

[Critics' Choice]
Until Jun 17 British Museum, Great Russell Street, London, WC1B 3DG

A new exhibition opening at the British Museum on Thursday provides an opportunity to see the artworks that were largely responsible for shaping England’'s initial idea of America.

The centrepiece of the exhibition is a collection of watercolours by John White, who travelled to America with Sir Walter Raleigh in order to document the New World.

White's fascinating pictures of the complex and sophisticated culture of the North Carolina Algonquin Indians and the landscapes, wildlife and plants of 'Virginia' (what we now call North Carolina was named by Raleigh for his queen) are the only surviving original visual record of this period of America’s history. Although the paintings are all part of the British Museum’s collection, they are being displayed together for the first time in 40 years. They’re accompanied by artefacts – portraits, maps and navigational instruments – loaned by the National Portrait Gallery, the British Library and the National Maritime Museum to set the scene at the Elizabethan court in a display that marks the 400th anniversary in May of the first permanent Jamestown settlement.

The exhibition also provides a glimpse of the earlier ‘lost colony’ of Roanoke. Although relatively few facts have come to light about John White, it is known that he was part of a second expedition dispatched by Raleigh after an initial fact-finding voyage in 1584. Accompanying Thomas Harriot, Raleigh's tutor in navigation, a linguist, recorder and surveyor whose task was to establish the land’s potential for farming and trade. White’s job was to produce visual records and maps in order to drum up investment and entice colonists prepared to found an English plantation.

The 1585 voyage anchored off the outer banks of what is now North Carolina built a small fort on the island of Roanoke, surveyed the coastline and brought back to England reports and pictures of the site they deemed the perfect place to start an English community. Preparations were made for a permanent colony of 115 men women and children at the 'Cittie of Raleigh' on the Chesapeake and John White was appointed their governor with 12 assistants. But when the new expedition set off in 1587 it landed at Roanoke with insufficient supplies. White was obliged to return to England to get assistance but once there he found that, because of the Spanish Armada, his relief ships were denied permission to sail.

When he finally made it back to North Carolina, three years later in 1590, no trace of the colonists remained and the legend of the 'lost colony' of Roanoke – the subject of much intriguing internet debate – was born.

International Symposium: Benin – Kings and Rituals

Benin – Kings and Rituals
Court Arts from Nigeria
International Symposium

May 9th-10th 2007

Organized by the
Museum für Völkerkunde
1010 Wien, Austria
Neue Burg
Vortragssaal/Lecture hall

Information:
Tel.: 0043 1 53430-212/270 or 53430-5002/5003
[email protected]

Conference language is English

The exhibition Benin — Kings and Rituals, Court Arts from Nigeria marks the first time that masterpieces from Benin dispersed in European and American collections since the late nineteenth century are reunited. Over 300 carefully selected objects offer a broad survey of the royal arts and culture of the Kingdom of Benin from its inception in the fourteenth century to its overthrow by British forces in the late nineteenth century. The exhibition further documents the kingdom’s reconstitution during the colonial period and its continuity into the twenty-first century.

On the occasion of the opening of this important Benin-exhibition the Museum für Völkerkunde Wien organizes an international symposium to highlight the latest research results on art and cultural history of the Benin kingdom from a broad perspective. For the symposium the most well-known experts from Nigeria, Europe and the United States are invited to present the latest results of historical, anthropological and iconographic research.

This offers the singular opportunity for the researchers with differing disciplinary backgrounds to exchange and discuss their research results in the context of a scholarly meeting open to the public. Members of the Benin royal family and representatives of the artists' guilds in Benin will contribute with their important inside view.

Program

Wednesday May 9, 2007

Benin Art and its Turbulent History.

From 08:30 on Registration

09:45 Official Welcome and Opening Session

10:00 Barbara Plankensteiner, Curator, Museum für Völkerkunde Wien
Benin Art. The Causes and Routes of its Dispersal Worldwide

10:30 Prince G.I. Akenzua, Benin City
The Loss of the Benin Artworks and their Original Function

11:00 Coffee Break

11:30 Joseph Eboreime, Director General, National Commission for Museums and Monuments of Nigeria
Benin Art in the Future Scheme of Nigerian Museums

12:00 Christian Feest, Director, Museum für Völkerkunde Wien
Observations on the Restitution of Cultural Property in a Global Perspective

12:30 Lunch Break

The State of Research on Benin Art and History

History

14:00 Patrick Darling, Bournemouth University, UK
Re-Writing Benin’s History: The Conflicting Roles of Archaeologists, Historians, Ethnographers and Traditional Politics over time

14:30 Adam Jones, Institut für Afrikanistik, Universität Leipzig
European Sources for Benin and its Art in the 17th and 18th Centuries

15:00 Benson Osarhieme Osadolor, University of Benin, Benin City
Benin History Studies. The State of the Discipline and the Flowering of Local History

15:30 Stefan Eisenhofer, Staatliches Museum für Völkerkunde München
Local Histories in Benin and their Problematic

16:00 Coffee Break

Art

16:30 Kathy Curnow, Philadelphia, USA
Benin Art and its Position and Relations in a larger Regional Perspective

17:00 Barbara Blackmun, Las Mesa College San Diego, California, USA
State of Research on the Interpretation of Benin Iconography

Thursday May 10, 2007

Continuation : The State of Research on Benin Art and History

Memory

08:30 Flora Edouwaye Kaplan, New York University
Photography in Benin. A Source of Memories

09:00 Peju Layiwola, Lagos University
New Forms of Commemoration and Remembrance: Commemorative Textiles in Benin

09:30 Charles Gore, SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies) London
Memory-Making in Art, Ritual and Performance of Benin

10:00 Coffee Break

Collection Histories

10:30 Gisela Völger, Köln
Felix von Luschan and his Relevance for Contemporary Research on Benin

11:00 Silvia Dolz, Museum für Völkerkunde Dresden
History and Relevance of the Fairly Known Dresden Benin Collection

11:30 Kay Heymer, Essen
Benin Art and Modernism

Benin Art today and the Quest for Authenticity

12:00 Daniel Inneh, Benin City
Surviving Guilds in Benin. Their Function in Society and Relation to the Royal Palace

12:30 Chief K. Osarhenhen Inneh, Benin City, Ine of the Bronzecasters Guild
Prospects for the Bronzecasters Guild in Benin

13:00 Lunch Break

14:30 Joseph Nevadomsky, Fullerton University California, USA
Contemporary Brass-Casting Production and Styles in Benin

15:00 Paula Ben-Amos Girshick, Indiana University, USA
Benin Art in the Global Market: Circulating across the African Continent

15:30 Chika Okeke-Agulu, Philadelphia
The Burden of Tradition: Modern Edo Artists and the Legacy of "Benin" Art

16:00 Coffee Break

16:30 Thomas Fillitz, Universität Wien
The Issue of Authenticity in Relation to African Art

17:00 Peter Junge, Ethnologisches Museum Berlin
The Chronology of Benin Art. Limitations of Stylistic and Scientific Methods of Dating

17:30 Break

Benin as Trademark. The Production and Market of Fake Benin Bronzes

18:00 Roundtable Discussion with:
Barbara Blackmun, Alexander von Berswordt-Wallrabe, Joseph Nevadomsky, Peter
Junge, Peter Krejsa
Moderation/Chair: Barbara Plankensteiner

+++

Participation Fee: € 40,-
Reduction (Students, Friends of the Museum): €15,-

Roundtable Discussion: Benin as Trademark: Free Admission
Limited number of participants

Information and Registration:
Tel.: 0043 1 53430-212/270 or 53430-5002/5003
[email protected]

Registration and Payment will be closed by 27th April 2007.