This archive report was first published on 25 November 2019.
Reclaiming Kenyan Art from Foreign Museums ¶
Published on November 25, 2019
Kenya's rich cultural heritage has been plundered for centuries, with many of its art pieces ending up in foreign museums. However, the National Museums of Kenya (NMK) is taking steps to reclaim its art and change the narrative around lost African art.
Under its International Inventories Programme (IIP), the NMK aims to investigate the writings and conversations held about Kenyan cultural objects that exist in institutions outside the country. The programme will result in an exhibition called Invisible Inventories, which will showcase the stories behind these lost art pieces.
The IIP is a collaborative project between the NMK, the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum in Cologne, the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt/Main, and the Goethe-Institut Nairobi. For artistic and cultural input, the museums have partnered with the NEST collective in Kenya and the SHIFT collective in Germany.
The NEST collective, a multi-disciplinary collective of Kenyan creatives, has been behind award-winning projects such as To Catch Dream and Tuko Macho. The collective's artistic director, Dr Njoki Ngumi, and Jim Chuchu, have collaborated before to create the award-winning anthology, Stories of Our Lives.
The Invisible Inventories exhibition will be launched on Thursday, November 28, at the National Museums in Nairobi. The exhibition aims to encourage public discourse into the complexities and varied viewpoints around diverse conceptions of heritage, erasures, and edits in object histories and provenances, object ownership and their movement across borders.
