For the first time since its inception in 1895, the Venice Biennale contemporary art fair has invited the West African nation of Benin to host a pavilion. Curator Azu Nwagbogu and his team of four artists…
The large exhibition features 213 designers. This high-level competition of talents from all over the world is a showcase for leading artists, a springboard for the youngest.
LAST MONTH, when Benin’s Palais de la Marina in Cotonou opened its doors, a belated history class swung into session. Organized by the president’s office and titled “Benin Art from Yesterday to Today, from Restitution to Revelation,” the exhibition paired work by thirty-four contemporary Beninese artists with a trove of twenty-six royal objects pillaged by the French military from the Dahomey Kingdom’s capital of Abomey in 1892. Beninese people remain closely linked to their ancestral culture, they had just been prevented from seeing and interacting with (some of) it for over a century. Not
We start the show in Benin, as 26 treasures looted by the French during colonial rule will be exhibited in Cotonou.The artefacts were returned by Paris's Quai Branly Museum after 129 years in exile.…