Restitution and Return

The discussion raises contemporary questions of restitution of cultural property taken during periods of colonial expansion. Curator Sean Anderson discusses the challenges of the repatriation of monuments and the protocols of repair; artist Kader Attia explores models of repair that do not aspire to erase the inherent injury but rather embody new forms of resistance; and professor of philosophy Souleymane Bachir Diagne addresses the translation of objects from objects of ethnographic curiosity to artworks and how a material return can occasion resocialization and transformation.

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Documenting Migration in Contemporary Art: Bouchra Khalili’s The Mapping Journey Project

How to raise awareness of the most recent refugee crisis in the Mediterranean in a way that does not spectacularize human suffering? Beginning with Bouchra Khalili’sThe Mapping Journey Project, this essay addresses how the present crisis has manifested as image and has made its way, across a variety of methodological and ethical approaches, into works of…

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Opening the Path for a Feminine Abstraction: Malika Agueznay and the Casablanca School

Malika Agueznay was among the first woman modernist abstract artists in Morocco. She was a student at the Casablanca École des Beaux-Arts from 1966 to 1970, during the experimental tenure of the faculty known as the Casablanca School. Shaped by the formative experience within the school, she has also distinguished herself by the ways her research emphasizes her female identity. Throughout her career, she has elaborated on seaweed as a central motif in her abstract practice. This motif is both deliberately evocative of femininity and rooted in her own female perspective.