How does the law determine the rights of cultural objects? Where should they belong?
Legal specialist Erin Thompson and political scientist Pierre Losson discuss the legalities and politics of repatriation campaigns, especially when countries such as Mexico and Nepal, among many others, claim artifacts from collections in the United States and Europe. How do these campaigns write and rewrite the past to give expression to nationalism and other identities? Looking at Gala Porras-Kim’s works about artifacts-turned-museum objects and her attempts to help them “exit” the museum, Erin and Pierre discuss when artifacts have indeed left a museum to return to ritual use, and when such attempts to take objects back out of the realm of museums have failed.
This event is free and open to the public.