Thinking About Absence in Museums

In this talk, Bénédicte Savoy will look at the emptiness that art and cult objects leave in their place of origin when, in the course of history, through armed conflict, colonial occupation or economic asymmetries, they have been moved to be displayed in (mostly Western) museums - with all the political, economic and epistemological implications that this entails.

Bénédicte Savoy is Professor of Modern Art History at the Technische Universität Berlin. From 2016 - 2021, she simultaneously held a professorship at the Collège de France in Paris for the cultural history of artistic heritage in Europe from the 18th to the 20th century. Her research focuses on museum history, French-German cultural transfer, Nazi looted art, and Postcolonial provenance research. In 2018, she wrote the report "On the Restitution of African Cultural Heritage", together with the Senegalese scholar Felwine Sarr, commissioned by the French President Emmanuel Macron. In 2021 Savoy and Sarr were in the TIME 100 list of the most influential people of the year. Savoy has received numerous awards for her research and academic teaching, including the 2016 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation and most recently the Berlin Science Prize. She is a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, a Knight of the French Legion of Honour and a member of various other institutions, advisory boards, and committees. Her most recent publications include the book Africa’s Struggle for Its Art: History of a Postcolonial Defeat, which has been translated into several languages, and the joint publication Atlas der Abwesenheit. Kameruns Kulturerbe in Deutschland (Atlas of Absence: Cameroon's Cultural Heritage in Germany).

This event is associated with the screening and discussion of Dahomey (Mati Diop, 2024) on Thursday April 17. More information here.

Host or Publisher CU Maison Française