Joy and laziness: contemporary art in ethnographic museums

Abstract

Many ethnographic museums have begun to incorporate contemporary art into the display of their permanent collections. Whether to compensate for historical gaps, to modernize exhibition spaces, or to respond to decades of critiques that have framed ethnographic (and universal) museums as material embodiments of colonial narratives. With the public and media resurgence of debates on restitution, contemporary art has come to function in these institutions as a purported gesture of openness to discussions on the return of objects, or as a way of absorbing and reframing external critiques within the very walls of the museum—almost as if works by artists whose ancestors were dispossessed could redeem museums from their sepulchral aura and their collector-spirit inherited from early cabinets of curiosities. This article examines the decolonizing role attributed to contemporary art in ethnographic museums and its limits within broader policies of repair and restitution. It analyzes the works of contemporary artists featured in two recent ethnographic museum exhibitions: Emeka Ogboh at the Museum Wereld (through October 2024) in Leiden, the Netherlands, and Mayowa Tomori and Osaze Amadasun in the exhibition Benin – Retrospective–Perspective (October–December 2023) at the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt, Germany. All three artists address the restitution of the bronze objects from the former Kingdom of Benin. Drawing on Marília Xavier Cury’s (2021) methodological framework, the article investigates how exhibition design generates
distinct interpretive cues, while the accompanying labels ultimately converge toward the same conclusion: that the restitution of these objects does not lie within the remit of the museums themselves.