Masks, Museums, and Memory

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Twitchin, Mischa. 2025. 'Masks, Museums, and Memory'. In: Museums, Memory, Politics. Online, United Kingdom 24 - 25 January 2025. [Conference or Workshop Item]

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Museums and Memory conference program Jan, 24-25, 2025 final.pdf - Supplemental Material
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The order of terms in my title could, of course, be different – given that the subject of my presentation is the set of relations that they evoke, in which each term displaces any supposed anchoring by another. The specific example through which I will refract these relations is that of the Queen Idia masks, made in the Kingdom of Benin in the sixteenth century and exhibited in Western museums since the twentieth century, following the British looting in 1897. While there are several ‘original’ versions of this ivory mask, there are countless replicas; and it is two such that I will focus on – one by Joseph Igbinovia (made in Lagos in 1976) and one by Derrick Giles (made in London in 1977) – each commissioned for opposite political reasons concerning its restitution. The vectors (both material and metaphorical) between ‘original’ and ‘replica’ provide the dynamic of relations in my title, through which the ‘biography’ of the mask currently held in the British Museum offers a paradigm case for considering the colonial-modern museum’s entanglement in contested (‘shared’) cultural memory. The implications of and for the emerging sense of decoloniality, after all, change the supposed understanding of the ‘world’ appropriated by erstwhile ethnographic museums and their claims for universalism, the tensions of which are powerfully addressed in the work, for instance, of Achille Mbembe. As a figure for addressing the memory politics of the museum, where it offers an example for understanding such memory as a construction in and for the present, the mask will also be explored in the work of poets such as Niyi Osundare, the iconography of Festac ’77, and the contemporary example of Afrobeats star, Rema.

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Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)