The self-conception of provenance research as practised by Digital Benin is shaped by a deliberately circumscribed institutional framework. The project focuses almost exclusively on objects held in public museum collections, while private provenances are largely excluded. This exclusion is justified pragmatically, with reference to limited resources, legal uncertainties, and concerns that increased visibility of private holdings might stimulate market activity.¹ Yet this decision marks a significant blind spot within contemporary provenance research and warrants critical scrutiny.
From a provenance-historical perspective, private collections are not marginal supplements but structurally integral to the colonial biographies of Benin and Ife objects. Their circulation rarely followed a linear trajectory from military seizure to public museum acquisition. Instead, objects moved through complex networks of private ownership involving colonial officers, traders, auction houses, heirs, and collectors. The exclusion of these stages truncates object biographies precisely at those junctures where colonial appropriation, economic valorisation, and social distinction intersect most clearly.
Epistemologically, this exclusion is particularly problematic. While Digital Benin explicitly seeks to render colonial violence and its afterlives visible, it addresses only implicitly one of its most persistent manifestations: private ownership as a continuation of colonial dispossession. Responsibility for expropriation is thereby displaced onto public institutions alone, while individual actors, familial continuities of possession, and market-based forms of appropriation remain largely obscured. Colonial history is once again narrated through institutional archives, whereas non-institutional modes of transfer and custody are epistemically marginalised.²
From a decolonial standpoint, this strategy remains deeply ambivalent. Although it shields the project from immediate legal and economic contestation, it simultaneously reproduces an asymmetrical knowledge order. Visibility is granted primarily to what Western institutions have already deemed collectible, documentable, and publishable. Private provenances—often characterised by opacity, silence, or deliberate obfuscation—thus evade historical accountability. For Edo communities in particular, this means that significant dimensions of the dispossession of their cultural heritage remain untold.
This omission stands in tension with Digital Benin’s declared ambition to provide a relational and comprehensive understanding of object histories. By excluding an entire sphere of provenance, the project produces a paradoxical outcome: dispersal processes are made visible, yet their full social and economic infrastructure remains unexamined. Provenance emerges less as a continuous relational history than as an institutionally framed sequence of custodial transfers.
In past conversations with Felicity Bodenstein and Bénédicte Savoy, we repeatedly raised concerns about the epistemic narrowing that results from the exclusion of private collections, particularly where moral considerations eclipse analytical differentiation. It is widely assumed that a substantial proportion of Benin and Ife objects entered Western collections not through direct acts of plunder but through private trade. Against this background, it is difficult to understand why such acquisition histories are now not only marginalised but at times implicitly criminalised. Publishing these histories on Digital Benin would arguably generate far greater transparency than decades of public display in galleries, during which no restitution claims were advanced by countries of origin. This is not to trivialise events such as those of 1897; rather, it is to insist on proportionality. A pars pro toto logic that imputes looting across the board remains scientifically untenable.⁴
Beyond its institutional limitations, Digital Benin also reveals a further, insufficiently examined epistemic gap: the uncritical adoption of a colonial visual regime in its photographic representations. The images presented on the platform largely adhere to a representational canon rooted in early twentieth-century European art history, whose colonial implications have long been subject to critique.³
As Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie demonstrated in his 2018 lecture Carl Einstein’s “Negerplastik” and the Invention of “African Art”, Einstein’s influential publication shaped not only textual interpretation but, more decisively, a visual politics that contributed to the colonisation of African art. Ogbechie draws particular attention to the use of photography as an epistemic instrument. Sculptures are depicted only frontally or in three-quarter view, isolated in space, softly lit, and stripped of their material, social, and ritual contexts. Colour, attachments, textiles, traces of use, and signs of performativity are removed or neutralised in order to present the objects as timeless, autonomous formal constructions.⁵
This strategy deliberately excluded cultural meaning in favour of formal analysis. As Ogbechie makes clear, however, this formalism was far from neutral. It constituted a powerful epistemic operation that detached African objects from their own systems of meaning and reinserted them into a Western modernist framework. The resulting visual language shaped not only early modernist theory but also museum conventions that persist to the present.
Against this background, it is striking that Digital Benin—a project committed to exposing colonial violence and epistemic asymmetry—largely reproduces this long-criticised visual regime. The platform’s photographs frequently replicate the very conventions Ogbechie identified as colonial: isolated objects, neutralised backgrounds, standardised viewpoints, and visual decontextualisation. Provenance thus appears primarily as an administrative record of ownership rather than as a materially and culturally embedded relational practice.
Responsibility, however, does not rest with Digital Benin alone. International museums must also be held to account for continuing, more than a century after Carl Einstein, to supply the same photographs—long recognised within visual studies as colonial relics—to contemporary digital platforms. Suzanne Preston Blier has repeatedly emphasised that photography itself forms part of an object’s provenance: images have origins, histories, and political functions.⁶ On Digital Benin, these visual genealogies remain largely unexamined, thereby perpetuating the very colonial contexts the project seeks to critique.
A particularly sensitive area of museum practice concerns the handling of the materiality of objects. In the 1960s and 1970s, many ethnological collections in Europe and North America were extensively reorganised. As part of this process, numerous objects – including metal works such as the well-known Benin, Ife or Tada bronzes – were subjected to sometimes intensive conservation interventions. Cleaning, polishing and the standardisation of surfaces followed the prevailing conservation ideals of the time. Today, however, it is increasingly clear that these interventions were far from neutral. They were guided by Western concepts of aesthetics, ageing and value, and they intervened deeply in both the material and symbolic histories of the objects.
Conservation is therefore never merely an act of preservation; it is always also an act of interpretation. Against this background, the notion of an “original condition” becomes highly problematic. As Dr Junkers⁶ has pointed out in his lecture “The original condition – where has it gone?”, the term can rarely be defined in any unambiguous way. Objects change over time: through use, environmental conditions and transport, and not least through museum handling. Storage in depots, repeated conservation treatments, photographic staging or new systems of classification all leave traces and become inscribed in an object’s biography.
Museums are thus not only places of safekeeping, but active agents in the histories of the objects they hold. Especially in ethnological collections, it becomes evident that colonial ways of thinking do not persist solely at the moment of acquisition. They can also be reproduced within the institution itself – through dominant classificatory systems, standardised modes of display, or the marginalisation of knowledge perspectives from source communities. A critical engagement with provenance must therefore extend beyond questions of ownership or restitution. It also requires close scrutiny of the internal routines, norms and taken-for-granted practices of museum work. Contemporary provenance research necessarily operates on at least two levels: external provenance, referring to the history of acquisition, and internal provenance, referring to the subsequent museum life of objects.These two dimensions are inseparably connected. Only if museums acknowledge their own role as historically effective actors can a responsible, transparent and genuinely dialogical engagement with collections become possible. Provenance does not end at the museum door; it continues within the museum itself.
But back to the most important point: In conclusion, the exclusion of private provenances is not merely a technical or organisational decision, but an epistemic choice with far-reaching implications. It limits the critical scope of Digital Benin’s provenance research and leaves key mechanisms of colonial appropriation insufficiently analysed. For a project that presents itself as decolonial, transparent, and multiperspectival, this omission constitutes a structural contradiction—one that cannot be resolved through claims of methodological neutrality, but only through sustained reflexivity and conceptual openness.
Footnotes