Blog 4: Colonial Realism: Objects and Statues, Subjects and Torts, Reporting Stolen Items of Museums, Prof. Dan Hicks

I grew up going to museums, walking around the Gates of Ishtar in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, and listening to my mother's stories about ancient Iraqi civilization and Islamic art and architecture, as she thoroughly explained its influence on the global North and the modern-day cities. I often brushed off her comments as the perspectives of exiles looking for remnants of their homeland in every building and museum we visited, seemingly everything I grew up with was looted either during colonisation or armed conflict. Today, I find it fascinating how cultural heritage sites and art can touch our personal lives and condition our childhoods, but we don’t often question the origins of museums.

In the early days of my law studies, I used to follow debates about the "Rhodes Must Fall" Movement in Oxford that raised challenging questions about public art and its subverted violence. I was surprised to see the Rhodes statue at Oriel College when I first came to Oxford, having assumed it had been taken down years ago. Therefore, I was extremely excited to attend Dan Hicks' Discussion Group on “Colonial Realism: Objects and Statues, Subjects and Torts, Reporting Stolen Items of Museums.”

Hicks' argument that monuments such as the Rhodes statue in Oxford represent an everyday reality of violence opened my eyes. But his direct call against the colonial history of Oxonian ornamentation sheds light on how beauty is perceived and relational. The maintenance of the statue suggests that Rhodes, a name linked to colonization and institutional racism, still plays an important role at Oxford. Hicks mentions that the violence implied by the failure to remove these statues is palpable, as students and the residents of Oxford continue to be overseen by the figure of Rhodes. According to Hicks artworks, in this context, function as memory. Hicks contends that statues like that of Rhodes symbolize a continual hate crime in urban spaces. Hence, the toppling of Edward Colston's statue in Bristol holds significant importance. Removing of the statue, as an act of decolonization, reclaimed historical truth and challenged this hate crime.  

Art and politics are closely entwined - public celebrations, such Ramadan lights in Leicester Square and Diwali lights in Trafalgar Square, make political statements by celebrating diverse cultures. Meanwhile, Rhodes still stands in Oxford. During the discussion, Hicks mentioned Oxford's approach of "retain and explain," according to which historical monuments are preserved and their controversial past contextualised. This narrative of colonial aesthetics is evident not only in Oxford's architecture but also in its traditions about appearance, which can cause discomfort and self-consciousness to those unfamiliar with them. We can draw upon Saidiya Hartman: in "Wayward Lives" she reimagines the lives of early 20th-century young black women, encouraging us to use imagination and critical fabrications to fill historical gaps. We can recontextualize our place within Oxford's historical narrative.

Understanding buildings, art, and architecture as hate crimes reminds me of growing up in Germany and learning from a young age about the destruction of Nazi art and the close relationship of some artists with the Nazi regime. The work of restitution in European museums entails asking similar questions. It involves probing legal definitions like tort law, theft, and damage, and grasping their roles across various disciplines and in artworks. Recognizing artworks as subjects, not just objects, is crucial in this discourse - it will assist to find an answer to the question: How did imperialism endure?