Humans have been getting ink for at least 5,200 years. Here are some of the most intriguing ancient tattoos, from cultic symbols to complex horse motifs. The remains of the intricately tattooed body ...

Click to open image viewer. CC0 Usage Conditions ApplyClick for more information. This figure is one of a group of male and female figures from the court of King Ockiya of Brass. Brass was a port in ...

On Jan. 20, 1894, Béhanzin, the 11th ruler of Dahomey — the kingdom in the area today known as Benin — stood before his subjects, fully aware it would be for the last time. Soon he would surrender ...

Mati Diop likes summoning spirits. In 2019’s Cannes-premiering Atlantics, the ghosts of young Senegalese men lost in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Dakar come back to haunt people in their bid to ...

In 2021, 26 treasures that French colonial troops had pillaged from the African kingdom of Dahomey in 1892 made the long journey home from a museum in Paris to what is now the Republic of Benin. Their ...

For years, art museums and their critics have discussed repatriation. In the art world, repatriation is the act of returning controversially acquired artifacts to their home countries.

A long-silent voice from a distant past — eerie and reverberating — awakens in the climate-controlled, antiseptic chambers of a Paris museum. The forum through which this entity communicates to us is ...

“Dahomey” packs a lot of introspection and heart into its brisk 68 minutes. Actor-director Mati Diop’s documentary chronicles the transfer of 26 royal treasures from an exhibition in Paris’s Musée du ...

Mati Diop's Dahomey centers on the repatriation of 26 stolen Beninese objects and how it could shape the African country’s future. In the first 30 minutes of the documentary, Diop gives viewers a ...

University of Manchester provides funding as a member of The Conversation UK. Dahomey, a new documentary film from the award-winning French director Mati Diop, follows the unconditional restitution ...