Bringing together artists, researchers and curators, the conference explores how provenance research can be expanded through artistic practice, digital spaces and collaborative knowledge production, and how questions of restitution, rematriation and repair resonate across different colonial histories and contemporary artistic practices.
The programme unfolds through three interconnected movements:
RECONNECTING – Digital Futures: From Digital Archives to Digital Futures
How can digital technologies create new relationships between people, collections and knowledge?
REIMAGINING – Research-Creation and Critical Fabulation
How can artistic research and critical fabulation generate new forms of knowledge beyond the colonial archive?
REPAIRING RELATIONS – Beyond Restitution: Art, Memory and the Making of New Relations
How can artistic practices contribute to processes of reparation and the creation of new relationships beyond restitution?
Bringing together artists, curators, activists and researchers from Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, Benin, France and Germany.
Confirmed participants: Sammy Baloji (artist - DRC) · Peju Layiwola (artist and art historian - Nigeria) · Zora Snake (choreographer and performance artist - Cameroon) · Hervé Youmbi (artist - Cameroon) · Ruth Afane Belinga (artist and performer - Cameroon) · Jelili Atiku (performance artist - Nigeria) · Sylvie Njobati (activist and cultural heritage advocate - Cameroon) · Viviane Maghela (curator and cultural practitioner - Cameroon) · Farah-Clémentine Dramani-Issoufou (curator - Benin-France)
Further participants and full programme to be announced.
This international conference takes place within the research project PERFORM – Performing Provenance: Contemporary Art, Digital Spaces and Cultural Belongings and in dialogue with the exhibition r e t u r n. PERFORM brings together the University of Münster, Université Paris 8, Université de Douala, Université de Bordeaux, LWL-Museum, Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum and Festival Modaperf. The conference is organised by Julie Peghini (University Paris8), Alexandra Galitzine-Loumpet (University Paris8), Ursula Frohne (University Münster) and Nanette Snoep (RJM).
Funded by the German-French Provenance Research Fund for Cultural Objects from Sub-Saharan Africa.
Für: Erwachsene
Veranstalter: Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum
| Teilnahme frei.
| Rahmenprogramm zu: „return“,
17.09.2026
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06.12.2026
