“Cultural restitution” is often understood as a set of policies and practices that act on cultural objects: museum artworks that are returned from one country to another, for example. But cultural restitution is also a tremendously creative field, which itself produces cultural life: new languages, new forms of knowledge production, new communities of interest, new works of art. This workshop brings together a cross-disciplinary group of scholars and practitioners working with colonial and postcolonial heritage to inquire into these cultures of restitution, to delineate their histories, and to understand their capacity to shape new worlds.

The workshop will culminate in an artist talk by Chidi Nwaubani, a co-founder of the artist collective Looty, which has experimented with the “digital repatriation” to Africa of looted objects housed in Western museums. (Anyone can attend Nwaubani’s talk, regardless of whether they attend other parts of the workshop.)

A recent Pozen News article previewed how panel participants will approach the topic of restitution.

SCHEDULE
9:00 – 9:15 a.m.
Introduction
Mark Philip Bradley, Bernadotte E. Schmitt Distinguished Service Professor of International History and the College; Faculty Director, Pozen Family Center for Human Rights; University of Chicago
Alice Goff, Assistant Professor of German History, University of Chicago

9:15 – 11:00 a.m.
Panel: Restitution and Justice
Leora Bilsky, Professor of Law and Director, Minerva Center for Human Rights, Tel Aviv University
The List: Between Post Holocaust and Post Colonial Restitution Struggles
Patty Gerstenblith, Distinguished Research Professor of Law; Faculty Director, Center for Art, Museum and Cultural Heritage Law; DePaul University
Historical Appropriations: Of Time, Obstacles to Restitution and Reparative Justice
Cresa Pugh, Assistant Professor of Sociology, The New School for Social Research
Just Artifacts: Competing Legal Frameworks Governing Cultural Heritage Restitution

11:15 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.
Panel: Restitution and the History of Objects
Jonathan Bach, Professor of Global Studies, The New School
Provenance-Centered Reckoning? Provenance Research as Memory Work in Germany
Mirjam Brusius, Research Fellow in Colonial and Global History, German Historical Institute London
Preservation in the Age of Repatriation. Why Are So Many Objects from Western Museum Collections in Storage

1:00 – 2:15 p.m.
Lunch

2:15 – 4:00 p.m.
Panel: Restitution and the Museum
Eunsong Kim, Associate Professor of English, Northeastern University
Colonially Bound, Digitally Free: On the Distance between Object and Image
Nicolas Revire, Daniel F. and Ada L. Rice Research Fellow, Art Institute of Chicago
Beyond Cambodia: Museums and the Dilemmas of Provenance and Restitution for Khmer Art
Alaka Wali, Curator of North American Anthropology, The Field Museum
Shifting the Paradigm for Cultural Restitution: A Case Study from the Field Museum

4:00 – 5:00 p.m.
Reception

5:00 – 6:30 p.m.
Artist Talk
Chidi Nwaubani, Founder and Lead Creative, LOOTY
Decolonizing Digital Spaces: Exploring the Intersection of Art, Technology, and Cultural Repatriation

Co-sponsored by the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry and the Pozen Center for Human Rights, in partnership with the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society.

Official Website

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Tags: Alaka Wali, Alice Goff, Bernadotte E. Schmitt, Chicago, Chidi Nwaubani, Cresa Pugh, Cultures of Restitution: Decolonial Histories, Cultures of Restitution: Decolonial Histories Justice and the Museum, Eunsong Kim, Jonathan Bach, Leora Bilsky, Looty, Mark Philip Bradley, Mirjam Brusius, Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, Nicolas Revire, Patty Gerstenblith, Pozen Family Center for Human Rights, Washington Park