The homecoming of Yinka Shonibare’s work from the 2024 Venice Biennale seemed to complete one historical circle while quietly opening another debate. Okechukwu Uwaezuoke argues
Really, it’s hard not to see the return of Yinka Shonibare’s “Monument to the Restitution of the Mind and Soul” to Benin City—after its acclaimed appearance at the 2024 Venice Biennale—as a victory lap. The installation was, after all, among the standout works of Nigeria Imaginary, the Nigerian Pavilion’s debut presentation at the Biennale. It directly intervened in ongoing debates about the restitution of looted African cultural heritage. Its arrival in Nigeria amounted to more than the relocation of an artwork between exhibition venues. It completed a symbolic circle, bringing the work to the very kingdom from which the Benin objects it references were looted during the British Punitive Expedition of 1897. The irony is difficult to miss: while the original bronzes remain dispersed across museums in London, Berlin, Vienna and elsewhere, their clay stand-ins have arrived home first.
It was only fitting, then, that the work should assume pride of place in Nigeria Imaginary: Homecoming, the inaugural exhibition marking the public opening of the Museum of West African Art (MOWAA) on November 11, 2025. Yet what ought to have stood out as a landmark moment in Nigeria’s recent cultural history flitted by with scant attention within the local art scene. Barely 48 hours before the exhibition opened, the museum campus became the site of a dramatic protest and forcible invasion by a group of protesters identifying as Indigenous Benin Youths and members of the Aiguobasinmwin Movement. Public attention shifted from the exhibition itself to the controversy surrounding the institution’s debut.
Yet the controversy obscured another story, one embedded in the installation itself. It has less to do with the return of objects than with the provenance of ideas.
Standing before “Monument to the Restitution of the Mind and Soul”, anyone familiar with Professor Peju Layiwola’s 2010 landmark exhibition Benin1897.com: Art and the Restitution Question is likely to experience a distinct sense of déjà vu. The resemblance extends far beyond the shared subject of the Benin Bronzes. It extends into the work’s material choices, installation strategy and conceptual framework.
Long before the restitution debate acquired its current international prominence, Layiwola had established herself as one of its most rigorous artistic voices. An artist, art historian, curator and granddaughter of Oba Akenzua II, she occupies a unique position within this history. Her engagement with the events of 1897 is at once scholarly, artistic and deeply personal.
Her 2010 exhibition proved pivotal. Instead of recreating the looted objects in their original medium, Layiwola deliberately opted for clay. Hundreds of unglazed terracotta heads spread across the gallery floor in solemn, mournful formations. Without bronze’s durability and prestige, they became fragile stand-ins for lives lost, broken histories and a fractured cultural memory. Alongside them were altered archival photographs, mixed-media works and installations such as “Theatre of War” and “Whose Queen?”, which turned colonial records into instruments of historical reckoning.
Against this backdrop, Shonibare’s Venice installation appears strikingly familiar. The similarities are difficult to ignore. Shonibare also abandons bronze for raw clay. He too relies on repetition to suggest the industrial scale of colonial plunder. As with Layiwola’s installation, the replicated forms function simultaneously as memorial, evidence and accusation. Neither artist attempts to recreate lost splendour. Both are concerned instead with absence, vulnerability and rupture.
None of this establishes that Shonibare consciously drew upon Layiwola’s work. Artists often arrive independently at similar solutions when responding to the same historical event. Even so, the parallels are striking enough to invite discussion.
More significantly, Layiwola’s work was not unknown to Shonibare. A photograph exists of Layiwola presenting him with a publication documenting her extensive research and artistic practice on the Benin restitution question. That photograph does not prove that “Monument to the Restitution of the Mind and Soul” grew directly out of her work but it does establish something equally important: Shonibare was aware of it.
That fact inevitably shifts the discussion. The issue is no longer whether he encountered Layiwola’s ideas. It is whether a work that echoes so many of her conceptual and material strategies shouldn’t reasonably have acknowledged that proximity.
Far from diminishing Shonibare’s achievement, such acknowledgement would place it within a richer and more honest conversation. No artist works in isolation. Ideas migrate. They are inherited, challenged, reshaped and sometimes returned in unexpected forms. Art history has always moved through that kind of conversation. Recognising it does not weaken originality; it clarifies it.
This case also raises a broader question about contemporary African art, where visibility is often determined less by innovation than by access to global institutions. Layiwola’s career illustrates the point since she is far less known than Shonibare despite the fact that her engagement with restitution extends well beyond the gallery.
In 2014 she initiated Whose Centenary?, a public intervention staged on Benin City’s historic Igun Street as a counterpoint to Nigeria’s official centenary celebrations of the 1914 amalgamation. Rather than commemorating colonial statehood, the project drew attention to the centenary of Oba Ovonramwen’s death. Artists, bronze casters, poets, performers and residents transformed the ancient bronze-casting quarter into a living museum where history, scholarship and public memory converged.
This sustained body of work makes it difficult to regard Layiwola as simply another artist addressing the Benin Bronzes. She has been one of the principal architects of the contemporary discourse surrounding restitution. That is what makes the absence of any visible acknowledgement of her ouevre’s conceptual and formal achievements in Shonibare’s Venice installation so striking.
Of course, no one expects footnotes in sculpture. But artists routinely acknowledge influences through interviews, exhibition catalogues, essays and public conversations. Such gestures do more than observe professional courtesy; they preserve the genealogy of ideas.
That matters particularly in a discourse devoted to restitution. Restitution is not only about returning objects. It is also about restoring visibility to those whose labour has been overlooked and whose contributions risk being absorbed into more visible narratives. If museums are increasingly expected to acknowledge the provenance of looted artefacts, contemporary art should be equally attentive to the provenance of ideas.
Shonibare’s “Monument to the Restitution of the Mind and Soul” deserves its place in the history of restitution. Its return to Benin City completed a powerful symbolic circle. Yet perhaps the work’s homecoming also invites another act of historical repair: a fuller recognition of the artists whose pioneering engagement with the Benin question helped make such a work possible. Because the provenance of an idea can be as important as the provenance of an artefact, a movement committed to restitution should recognise both.
