Despite its name, this sandstone slab is not a simple stone. It was once part of a monument, an ancient epigraph measuring three by three metres carrying about 50 lines of text.
The Parthenon Marbles in the British Museum.
EWY Media/Shutterstock
The marbles are a physical manifestation of what it meant to be Athenian during the 5th century BC.
Zoologist Elizabeth Morrison receives the Jamaican giant galliwasp from Mike Rutherford, a curator at the University of Glasgow, on April 22, 2024.
Jane Barlow/PA Images via Getty Images
Not all reparations involve money. Returning unique scientific resources is also a way of showing respect and righting past harms.
The Maya used mirrors as channels for supernatural communication. In this image, a supernatural creature speaks into a cracked, black mirror.
K2929 from the Justin Kerr Maya archive, Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University, Washington, D.C.
Experts say the ‘reimagining’ of the South Australian Museum will destroy its crucial contributions to science.
Indigenous artifacts from the northwest coast of North America on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
(AP Photo/John Minchillo)
U.S. laws on the repatriation of Indigenous artifacts and remains still uphold inequities in the relationships between Indigenous people and the agencies holding their materials.
The ruins of a church in Bohorodychne, Donetsk district, Ukraine, on Jan. 27, 2024.
Ignacio Marin/Anadolu via Getty Images
In addition to destroyed buildings, there’s an entire underground world – filled with untold numbers of artifacts, bones and ruins – that are exposed and damaged by the digging of trenches.
Women donning gorilla masks pose in front of the original Guerilla Girls posters, as part of the ‘Disobedient Objects’ exhibition at the V&A in 2014.
Eric Huybrechts/Wikimedia
The elephant in the room is the existing legal framework, forged in period of decolonisation and diminishing western influence, that forbids the repatriation of antiquities.
The Art Gallery of Ontario and the Royal Ontario Museum are among art institutions that have struggled with responses to the Israel-Hamas war. The Art Gallery of Ontario seen in Toronto in 2008.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nathan Denette
Especially in a time when trust in political leaders and institutions wanes, arts leaders, patrons, policymakers and artists face daunting but critical questions about the value and role of artists.
Does the simple fact of being in contact with art have any specific effects?
(Shutterstock)
From ill-thought renovation schemes to the latest row over the repatriation of the Parthenon marbles, this is not the first time the British Museum reckons with a custodianship crisis.
A 6 meter tall Ned Kelly stands on the main street of Glenrowan, Victoria.
Shutterstock
The Victorian Supreme Court has determined the descendants of Ned Kelly’s family are not a distinctive cultural group with the right to protections of their ‘intangible cultural heritage’.
One of the exhibits of notable Black people on display at International African American Museum.
courtesy of v2com/International African American Museum
The new museum opened at a time when the teaching of Black history is under attack by conservative politicians.
‘Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny’ comes out in theatres on June 30. The fifth in a series over 42 years, many of its originating ideas are taken from 19th-century racist archaeology. Will this iteration be different?
(Walt Disney Pictures)
The final Indiana Jones movie is coming out June 30. The fifth in a series over 42 years, many of its ideas are taken from 19th-century orientalist and racist archaeology.