Art du Bénin d'hier et d'aujourd'hui: de la Restitution à la Révélation curated by Léa Awunou Roufai and Yassine Lassissi (contemporary art) and Edmond Toli, Alain Godonou, and José Pliya (Danxomèan art)

On November 17, 1892, Colonel Alfred­ Amédée Dodds of the French Army raided the palace complex of Abomey, capital of the Kingdom of Danxomè, with a force of 2,164 Marines, engineers, sharpshooters, artillery units, Foreign Legionnaires, Senegalese light cavalry, and volunteers from the neighboring kingdom of Xogbónù (Alpern 1998: 193). Having conducted successful colonial cam­ paigns in Réunion, Senegal, and French Indo­ china, Dodds sought to bring the Danxomèan Kingdom under French control amid Europe’s manic scramble for Africa. Facing Dodds was King Gbéhanzin, a fearsome ruler and cunning military strategist, who had resisted French depredations since his enthronement in 1889. Anticipating Dodd’s attack on Abomey, Gbéhanzin torched the city’s palaces and retreated northward. Despite armed resistance and sporadic incursions mounted by Gbéhan­ zin over the next two years, Dodds’s taking of Abomey spelled the end of the second Franco­Danxomèan War (July 4, 1892–Jan­ uary 29, 1894), and with it, three centuries of uninterrupted Danxomèan rule.1 The fall of Abomey also precipitated the consolidation of one of the last autonomous African kingdoms into the Third Republic’s sprawling West African empire and cemented France’s position as a colonial powerhouse at the dawn of the twentieth century. Shortly after Dodds’s men hoisted the Tricolor above Abomey’s smoldering ruins, they discovered multiple caches of hastily buried jewelry, fabrics, thrones, statues, weapons, portable shrines, palace doors, and ritual paraphernalia (Beaujean 2019: 239). Rampant pillaging ensued, and what Dodds and his men could not take with them, or what they deemed worthless, they destroyed. Less than a year later, a newly promoted General Dodds made the first of two donations of pillaged Danxomèan objects to the Musée du Trocadero in Paris. A second gift in 1895 increased the Trocadero’s “Dodds Collection” to twenty­six objects. Over the next century, Gbéhanzin’s royal possessions were exhibited and otherwise held at the Musée du Tro­ cadero and the Musée de l’Homme before being transferred to the new Musée du quai Branly–Jacques Chirac in 2004. On December 24, 2020, following decades of campaigning and negotiations by Béninois heads of state, African art scholars, artists, and cultural activ­ ists, President Emmanuel Macron signed into law Restitution Bill n° 2020­1673, formalizing France’s intention to return the twenty­six works taken from Abomey by Dodds in 1892 (Castex et al. 2020). On November 10, 2021, France repatriated the objects in one of the most significant acts of object restitu­ tion to date. After more than a century of exile, the Danxomèan court treasures were displayed on Béninois soil in Art du Bénin d’hier et d’aujourd’hui: de la Restitution à la Révélation (Art of Bénin from Yesterday and Today: Restitution to Revelation). Opening in Cotonou on Febru­ ary 20, 2022, the landmark exhibition paired the objects seized by Dodds with more than one hundred works by thirty­four Béninois contemporary artists. As stated by Béninois president Patrice Talon in the preface of the ex­ hibition catalogues, Art du Bénin was inspired by the proverb, “it is at the end of the old rope that the new one is woven” (c’est au bout de l’ancienne corde qu’on tisse la nouvelle) (Talon 2022: 6). Adhering to the regenerative logic of the axiom, curators wove together three epochs of Béninois artistic creation. Beginning with the craftsmanship of Sossa Dede and other nineteenth century Danxomèan court artisans, displays segued into the twentieth century with pieces by Cyprien Tokoudagba, Amidou Dossou, and Ludovic Fadaïro, and culminated with works by emerging Béninois artists including Sènami Donoumassou, Éliane Aïsso, and Moufouli Bello. While the Ministry of Tourism, Arts, and Culture of Bénin sponsored the exhibition, planning and installation was handled by two independent Béninois organizations in partnership with the French design agency Les Crayons. Curation of the contemporary art wing was overseen by the National Gallery under the guidance of Léa Awunou Roufai and Yassine Lassissi, while the Danxomèan art wing was conceived by the National Agency for the Promotion of Heritage and Tourism of Bénin headed by Edmond Toli, Alain Godonou, and José Pliya. Art du Bénin opened at the 2,300 square­meter Salles des Fêtes et du Peuple at the Palais de la Marina in Cotonou and ran from February 20 to May 5, 2022.2 The show was free and open to the public Thurs­ days through Sundays, with evening receptions held on the last Saturday of each month. 1 Visitors admire the bocios of King Gbéhanzin and King Glèlè. Royal Art Section, Art du Bénin.