I

FROM BENIN KINGDOM TO THE BRITISH MUSEUM

The term Benin Bronzes is a somewhat misleading as it encompasses 4000+ artifacts that extend beyond bronze to include carved ivory objects, metal casts both in-the-round and in relief, coral beaded jewelry, wood carvings, leather works, and terracotta sculptures. These artifacts were stolen by British imperial forces from Benin Kingdom (mow part of Southern Nigeria) in 1897. Following the plunder, the artifacts were trasnported to England, where they were initally reviewed by Charles Read - the Ethnological curator at the British Museum. Read erroneously hypothesized that the objects were the work of “wandering Egyptians”, a theory that has since been debunked^{( 1 )}. In England, the artifacts were dispersed through auctions to various private collectors and institutions (see figure 1). Currently, the British Museum holds the largest collection of the 1897 loot. The remainder of the collection is scattered across approximately 160^{( 2 )} museums worldwide.

II

FROM THE BRITISH MUSEUM TO EBAY

The British Museum has long resisted^{( 3 )} calls for the repatriation of the Benin Bronzes, citing concerns about security and conservation in Nigeria. Yet, this justification is undermined by the museum's own track record of security lapses. Between 1993 and 2023, a series of illicit thefts and unauthorized sales accounted for the loss/damage of approximately 2,000^{( 4 )} gems and jewelry from the museum's Department of Greece and Rome. For example, an onyx Roman cameo^{( 5 )} valued between £25,000 and £50,000 was listed on eBay for a mere £40. Among these, 350 items were disassembled, presumably sold as scrap. 140 show evidence of damage from tool marks. Collectively, the thefts have raked in an estimated £150,000^{( 6 )} for the perpetrators.

This eBay sales, while not directly connected to the Benin Bronzes, serves as a catalyst for reassessing my data curation method for the speculative AI project-Igùn. What if I curate listings from eBay - a online marketplace that serves as a microcosm for the circulation of both replicas and hybrid sculptures inspired by classical Benin Bronzes?

III

FROM EBAY TO IGUN: PROTOTYPE IX BY MINNE ATAIRU

Prototype IX is a response to the incident at the British Museum. This gallery is a visual supplement for my project titled “Igùn: prototype IX”. It is a livefeed that utilizes eBay's API to aggregate images from active listings tagged 'Benin Bronzes.' Unlike its predecessors, I curated Prototype IX's dataset from eBay listings of replica and hybrid sculptures inspired by classical Benin Bronzes.

The 1897 invasion had a devastating impact on Benin's artistic landscape. British imperial soldiers razed the royal palace - a cultural complex that housed artist studios, residencies and repositories for imported art materials including the kingdom's bronze reserves. Amidst the chaos, Oba Ovonramwen—the Kingdom’s sole patron of the arts, was dethroned and exiled. The Oba’s exile prompted an exodus of artists from Benin city to satellite towns, where they forsook their artistic pursuits to engage in subsistence farming. This forced economic migration ushered in a 17-year (1897-1914) artistic recession — a period which lacks visual or archival records.

I developed Igùn to explore this undocumented era.

Prototypes I—VIII of the "Igùn" series employed StyleGAN2, a machine learning algorithm, to generate images based on datasets of artifacts looted during the invasion and now held in Western museums. The aim was speculative: to recreate prototypes of undocumented or lost artifacts.

Igùn: Prototype IX furthers this speculative study by delving into a question:

Can a StyleGAN model, trained on contemporary eBay listings offer new insights into artistic production during the recession era (1897-1914)?

TECHNICAL NOTE

Once a listing becomes inactive, the associated image will disappear from this gallery. All images are presented in descending order, with the most recent active listings displayed at the top. Some unrelated eBay items might be mislabeled as Benin Bronzes, and therefore will inadvertently appear in the gallery.

REFERENCES

1. British Museum. Department of British and Mediaeval Antiquities and Ethnography, Read, S. C. H., & Dalton, O. M. (1899). Antiquities from the City of Benin and from other Parts of West Africa in the British Museum. British museum, sold by Longmans & Company.
2. Second item
3. Kiwara-Wilson, S. (2012). Restituting colonial plunder: The case for the Benin bronzes and ivories. DePaul J. Art Tech. & Intell. Prop. L, 23, 375./li>
4. Third item
5. Marshall, A. (2023). British Museum Was Warned Gems Were Being Sold on eBay, Emails Show. International New York Times, NA-NA.