Stolen Artifact

Stolen Artifact was a short film made for the Mini Museum of XXI Century Art, a project curated by Domenico Quantara. The work was shown at Kotti Shop Berlin as a solo exhibition.

From the press release - Stolen Artifact takes as its starting point the observation that many of the world's museums have, over the years, built their collections from the outright or covert theft of other people's cultural heritage. «The return of these objects is an ongoing discussion for many western museums and the communities which claim them – the artists explain – and it seemed fitting that we should provide the MINI Museum of XXI Century Art with its own Stolen Artifact. So we made a short “guerilla” film of the bust of Nefertiti in the Neues Museum, Berlin – itself an artifact which the Egyptian Ministry for Antiquities are very keen to have returned. Beyond the idea that all “real” museums need to have some stolen goods on show is the fact that our theft, i.e. the “illegal” recording of an image against the orders of the institution, contravenes not the ownership of the object itself but the Neues Museum's ownership of that object's image (postcards are, of course, on sale in the shop). As such Stolen Artifact is both a video of a stolen object (Nefertiti) and is itself an act of theft whose artifacts, the jagged blotches from this iphone video, are concerned with entirely different question of ownership.»