‘Dahomey’ Complicates Tidy Narratives About Returning Looted Artworks

When she brought the sounds of Sing Sing to the Whitney Museum’s airy fifth floor in 2016, Andrea Fraser said she did so because prisons and art institutions are “two sides of the same coin of inequality.” If that statement seemed provocative eight years ago, it appears only mildly controversial now, at a time when museums are commonly seen as appendages of racist, colonialist, and deeply unfair systems.

And that may explain why, in the wonderful, knotty new documentary Dahomey, filmmaker Mati Diop shoots the backrooms of Paris’s Musée Quai Branly with such a cold gaze, as though they were the hallways of a penitentiary. Her camera matter-of-factly observes these clinical, gray spaces, with nary a human to be seen. It’s as if everyone and everything were locked away somewhere off-screen.

The inhabitants of this museum are not people but objects brought to France via colonialist conquests. Among her film’s subjects is a grouping of more than two dozen artifacts that were looted by French soldiers from the Kingdom of Dahomey in 1892, only to finally be returned home, in present-day Benin, in 2021, more than a century later.

Over the course of 68 minutes, Diop’s camera gradually finds its protagonist, a near life-size sculpture of King Ghezo that is held within a glass case. Throughout Dahomey, this sculpture is referred to by its inventory number, 26, as though it were an inmate, a captive deprived of a name. 26 has a voice, too—it speaks, literally, via narration, at various points throughout this documentary, thanks to booming dialogue intoned by Haitian writer Makenzy Orcel. “We all bear the same scars,” 26 says at one point.

But 26 does not talk until it is examined by Quai Branly staff, who have removed it from its holding cell and placed it inside a wooden crate. Diop’s camera joins 26 inside this coffin-like space, which is nailed shut before our very eyes. To watch that sequence feels like being buried alive.

To watch what happens next should feel like a resurrection: 26 emerges from darkness in the galleries of yet another exhibition space in Cotonou, Benin’s largest city. The moment ought to be glorious, heroic even. But it is not. 26 is inspected once more (“Good structural condition,” notes one conservator), then eventually left alone once again in a gallery space, out of public view at night. At one point, Diop zooms in on a security camera, as if to suggest that, even on its home turf, 26 can’t evade the very conditions that held it prisoner abroad.

Releasing theatrically this Friday in the US, Dahomey is a milestone within the ongoing debate surrounding repatriation, which continues to rage within the art world (and, in some cases, even far beyond it). Many believe looted treasures must be sent back where the once came from; many more think that Western museums are the best and safest home for these artifacts, an assumption some scholars have argued against. Dahomey seems to care little for either side in that debate because it suggests something different altogether: that repatriation is important, even necessary, but that the discussions surrounding it have sidestepped the issue of liberating artifacts, which have been ripped free of their initial contexts and sentenced to a life within institutional walls.

Can an artifact like 26 gain true freedom? A similar question was posed about different African objects with Statues Also Die, a legendary 1953 short by Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, and Ghislain Cloquet that acts as a clear inspiration for Dahomey. That film likewise portrayed African objects held in French national collections as the fruit of colonialism; it scorned Western culture for allowing their display within Europe.

But whereas Statues Also Die focuses, to its detriment, solely on France and America, Dahomey smartly exceeds the West by spending most of its runtime in Benin. This is itself a subversion of the Western repatriation narrative, which typically ends with objects flying home from Europe. Diop is instead more interested in exploring what happens once those objects come back.

What Diop presents is knotty and unconventional. Rather than having talking heads tout the returned objects and explicate the importance, Diop focuses on how the Beninese population hailed the odyssey of these 26 artifacts, whose speculative inner lives she centers. She spends time at the printing press utilized by La Nation, Benin’s government-run newspaper, whose front page is emblazoned with the headline “HISTORIQUE !” And while those in power may trumpet the historic nature of this return, Diop is quick to question the jubilant tone.

She features a prolonged sequence where Beninese youths discuss the exhibition of these artifacts. One student describes being “unaware” that these sculptures were held abroad and welcomes their homecoming. Others are more skeptical. “The aim is not to make people in Benin happy,” says another student. “The aim is to gratify France.”

Diop intersperses footage of all this heated sparring with images of the Cotonou exhibition, where a procession of visitors peers in at 26 within another glass cage. Some children look at the sculpture with wonderment, others with confusion. The King Ghezo sculpture stares back, unfazed. In this way, the artifact becomes the receiving end for many different gazes, none of which seem much focused on the sculpture’s original function (which largely goes undescribed in Dahomey, arguably on purpose). Most people simply shuffle by, having gotten their few seconds in front of it.

Might all museums be a poor fit for 26, given that it was never meant to exist in an art institution? Might 26 ever find liberation anywhere else? Is repatriation just another way to assuage white European guilt and the sins of colonialism? Dahomey offers no clear answers. The film’s greatest strength is its ambiguity. This concise film provides no one perspective on repatriation, no singular prescriptive for how best to contend with the issues broached by the students shown on screen.

It is obvious, however, that Diop empathizes most with one student who wants more. “Restituting 26 works out of 7,000 is an insult,” the student says, referring to the multitude of looted Beninese artifacts currently held by France—not to mention the thousands of others held by other Western institutions. Diop herself voiced a similar sentiment just before her film won the top prize at the Berlinale film festival earlier this year. “It’s quite clear that there were way too few compared with the 7,000 works held captive in these museums, and I certainly think that it is humiliating,” she told the Guardian.

She has gone on to describe Dahomey to that same publication as “un film d’anticipation,” utilizing the French verbiage typically used to denote a sci-fi movie but here meant as a statement of hope. Her documentary yearns for a day when 26 and thousands of stolen works like it will be released from captivity. “We need a revolution,” one student says. Dahomey obliquely plants the seed for such an uprising in the years to come.