FFF5 | Kader Attia: "The Body’s Legacies Pt 1"

Kader Attia’s film essay "The Body’s Legacies Pt 1: The Objects" is part of a trilogy that questions the colonized body. This first part is concerned with the restitution of objects that were taken from non-Western societies by the colonialising powers or by missionaries and delivered to Western countries. In Europe and North America, they entered private and public collections, and since then have been presented from a merely Western scholarly perspective: they have been ethnologized. Being categorised as ethnological objects, they have been emptied of their original meaning, and frozen in time, no matter if their original purpose included deterioration or even destruction. Whereas their actual function has been ignored mostly, these objects have gained a new identity: they have become cornerstones of archaeology, art history and ethnology, and now bear witness to the history of Western science and humanities. Like colonialized peoples and migrants, they now have two identities — much in the same way as archaeological artefacts from ancient Greece that have become part of the history of Classicist art of those countries to which they were brought by scholars in the 18th century.

Kader Attia’s film features interviews with experts specialising in the legacy of colonialism and in the seizure and restitution of traditional objects, both from Africa and North America. Far from being a documentation or historical survey, the work subtly reveals the psychological effects these acts of seizure have had on individuals and societies, and it becomes clear that the long negligence of the issue must be perceived by the deprived societies as ongoing injustice. But the film also raises the question about the effects on the Western societies: when such objects entered the physical space of Western museums they at the same time influenced the Western mind, especially the mind of artists and writers: they have shaped our concept of Modernity — and us ourselves as postmodern people.

The screening on 11th May, will be followed by a discussion titled "Relics Re-claimed". Five people working on or in between anthropology, museum studies, archaeology and art discuss with the artist about these issues and address questions such as i) the involvement of anthropology, archaeology and art in colonial projects and the self-reflexive interest in these issues that the three fields have developed, ii) the relationship between History and Histories, iii) the relevance the specific case of Greece may (or may not) have in discussions like those above related to (post)colonialism and claims for repatriation, iv) and the role contemporary art can play not only in thinking about, but also in acting vis-a-vis such claims.