Towards a New Museology

Gala Porras-Kim wants us to rethink how art institutes honour their holdings by Simon Wu

- Simon Wu

IN JANUARY 2024, muscums across the US closed exhibitions, removed objects from view and covered up displays. Under significant revisions to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) - a federal law first introduced in the 1990s mandating the return of select Indigenous American funerary objects - institutions retrieved objects to figure out how to comply with a newly expedited five-year repatriation timeline. A few months earlier, in October 2023, the Smithsonian Institution and the German government had announced the return of some of the Benin Bronzes hundreds of sculptures, plaques and ornaments plundered by British soldiers in 1897 from Benin City, in what is now Nigeria. Most recently, in November 2024, 1,440 trafficked antiquities, valued at more than US$10.4 million, were returned to India through the Manhattan District Attorney's office. Finally, after years of protest, the wheels of cultural restitution are turning.

Of course, this is just the beginning. (A NAGPRA database lists some 96,000 Native American human remains as still in museum collections.) But the restitution of some of these artefacts has already instigated new questions. In Benin, for example, as the objects return, will they be shown behind glass with accompanying texts as they were in the west? Many artefacts are returning to long-awaited burial sites, but for others, their original contexts no longer exist.