Panorama: Dahomey
After the screening, join us for a discussion with Victoria Reed, Curator for Provenance at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and Sandro Capo-Chichi, specialist in the history and culture of the kingdom of Dahomey.
In 2021, 26 objects from the Kingdom of Dahomey leave Paris and are returned to present-day Benin. How should these art treasures, stolen from ancestors, be received in a country which has reinvented itself in their absence?
About Victoria Reed
Victoria Reed has been conducting provenance research at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, since 2003. She is responsible for the research and documentation of the ownership history of the MFA’s encyclopedic collection. She has overseen the successful resolution of several ownership claims for the Museum, and has lectured and published extensively on provenance research, museum ethics, and restitution
About Sandro Capo-Chichi
Sandro Capo Chichi is a PhD candidate studying historical African arts with a focus on the Bight of Benin area in West Africa. He received his M.A. in Art History and Archaeology from the Université Paris 1 - Panthéon Sorbonne in 2019. His dissertation there dealt with the 18th-19th century royal arts of the Kingdom of Dahomey and their intersection with national identity, imperialism and metaphysics. Sandro also received a PhD in Linguistics from the Université de Paris 7 in 2019 and hopes to use this field of research as a tool for a better understanding of African Art History.
