20 May 2026
Another Gathering: The Beauty We Inherit is organized within the framework of the exhibition Back to Benin: New Art, Ancient Legacy, currently on view at Museum de Fundatie in Zwolle until 7 June 2026. The exhibition brings together ten contemporary artists of Edo background in dialogue with Ama O Ghe Ehen, a 18th-century bronze plaque depicting a mudfish, and its restitution from the Netherlands to Benin. Although artworks and objects have recently been returned to Benin, the historical, spiritual, cultural, and artistic rupture caused by their violent removal cannot be reversed. Recently, the Wereldmuseum Leiden has been involved in its own process of restitution and repatriation of Benin Bronzes that were housed in the museum's own collection. On Wednesday 19 February 2025, a special and meaningful ceremony took place at Wereldmuseum Leiden, whereby the restitution of 119 Benin Bronzes to Nigeria was signed: 113 art objects from the National Collection and 6 art objects from the collection of the municipality of Rotterdam. Though, the Wereldmuseum Leiden and the Museum de Fundatie worked with different processes of restitution based on the status of their collections, these two institutions have directly engaged and connected to the questions of ownership and absence that this collaborative gathering is grounded within.
This symposium asks: What does it mean to be in the wake of absence? Can absence become a site of imagination and knowledge? In what ways do spiritual, scientific, artistic and curatorial practices contribute to reconfiguring absence into new forms of presence, meanings and relations? Another Gathering: The Beauty We Inherit will bring together artists, scholars, writers, and curators some of whom have participated in the exhibition, its development, or its spaces to explore these questions through keynotes, screenings, conversations, and sonic and visual lectures, as well as performances.
Aude Christel Mgba (CMR/NL) is a curator and art historian based in the Netherlands. She participated in the De Appel Curatorial Programme 2018–19 in Amsterdam. 
Bhavisha Panchia is a curator and writer. Her curatorial and written work centres on the social, cultural and ideological signification of sound and music in contemporary culture. With an interest in auditory media’s relationship to geopolitical paradigms, anti/postcolonial discourses and imperial histories, she considers how we can critically listen back to listen forward. She is the founder of Nothing to Commit Records, a label and publishing platform committed to the production and expansion of knowledge related to contemporary art and sound within and across the global South. Her writings have been published in books, journals and exhibition catalogues. 
David Odiase is a transdisciplinary poet and member of the African Narrative Collective whose practice traverses the interstices of poetry, performance, film, indigenous technologies, and speculative methodologies. His work critically engages with Africa’s entangled histories, epistemologies, and cultural imaginaries, often seeking to dismantle hegemonic narratives and foreground ancestral knowledge systems as vital instruments for reworlding. 
Elijah Ndoumbe is a multidisciplinary artist, award-winning moving image maker, dream weaver, and collaborator. In between mixing live, Ndoumbe can be found cooking in Marseille wine bars, deepening familial food research in Douala, and building transatlantic collaborations via their lens-based arts practice(s). 
Emmanuel Ndefo is a dancer, researcher and choreographer from Nigeria who uses the body as both medium and interface to explore how movement can engage with urgent contemporary dialogues. Working with the metaphor of “hacking,” he imagines the body as a living network and experience as data, vulnerable to glitches yet also open to free creation, presence, and discovery. Rooted in dance, performance, and installation, his work draws from formal training in dance research alongside deep engagement with traditional African rituals and dances, and urban movement vocabularies. 
Festus Toll is a Dutch-Kenyan filmmaker and artist whose work connects personal histories with pressing social realities. His practice examines how colonial legacies, collective memory, and contemporary struggles continue to shape lived experience, seeking ways to break silences around overlooked and marginalized voices. The Story of Ne Kuko (2023) traced the journey of a looted African nkisi object back into today’s restitution debate, drawing international attention and opening conversations that extend beyond film and institutional spaces. 
Hélène Kelhetter was born in 1994 in Hauts-de-Seine and lives and works in Ivry-sur-Seine, France. A graduate of ESAD Reims in 2018, she has been exploring colonial and decolonial history since writing her dissertation in 2017. She examines macro-history through its micro-histories, drawing on her travels, experiences, and human and artistic encounters.
Kokunre Agbontaen-Eghafona is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Benin, Benin City (NG). She holds a BA (Honours) and MA in History (University of Benin); a MSc Archaeology (University of Ibadan); Professional Certificate in Museum Studies (New York University); PhD Archaeology (cultural resource management and museum studies). She is one of the Principal Investigators for the Digital Benin project. Her research interests include oral literature, ethnography of the Benin people of Nigeria, heritage management, and indigenous knowledge systems. 
Mistura Allison is a researcher, curator and art historian. She is the founder of ashikọ, a visually driven research platform inspired by Africa and its Diaspora. Currently, she serves as Curator and Project Coordinator at Villa Romana in Florence, engaging in transnational artistic practices with a focus in contemporary art and advancing methodologies of decentralised exhibition-making. Her work focuses on research-based practices engaging with the plurality of contemporary Diasporic visual and oral productions. She is part of the curatorial collective at Archive Ensemble, where she co-curates the programme Publishing Practices. 
Nkisi is a creative musician and artist based in London with Kongo roots. She uses sound as a way to explore the spiritual liberation technologies embedded in music and dance and how to keep these alive. Rhythm, sound and noise are used as ways to activate traces of memory inscribed in and by the body in motion. Through the use of sensory codes, Nkisi merges music, performance and research in ancient musical technologies to invite audiences to dance with the invisible and activate embodied forms of revolution and resistance for the unmaking and making of worlds. 
Renée Akitelek Mboya is a writer, curator and filmmaker. Her custom is one that relies on biography and storytelling as a form of research and production. Renée is presently preoccupied with looking and speaking about images and the ways in which they are produced but especially how they have come to play a critical role as evidence of white paranoia, and as aesthetic idioms of racial violence. 
(Paris, 1996) is a multidisciplinary artist of Guadeloupean, Cameroonian, and French heritage. Working across fashion, film, graphic design, photography, writing, and performance, she collects the voices of women with plural identities, exploring the tension between the lived, intimate body and the body as shaped by societal, racial, and gendered projections. 
Satch Hoyt is a spiritualist, a believer in ritual and retention. A visual artist and a musician, his diverse and multifaceted body of work—whether sculpture, sound installation, painting, musical performance, or musical recording—is united in its investigation of the “Eternal Afro-Sonic Signifier” and its movement across and amid the cultures, peoples, places, and times of the African Diaspora. Those four evocative words (a term coined by Hoyt) refer to the “mnemonic network of sound” that was enslaved Africans’ “sole companion during the forced migration of the Middle Passage.”¹ It was, and is, a hard-won somatic toolkit for remembering where you come from and who you are—and maybe, where you’re going—against all the many odds. 
