Making the Museum of West African Art
Ahead of the official, public launch of the Museum of West African Art (MOWAA) in Benin City, Edo state, set for 2025, MOWAA director Ore Disu discusses her vision for Africa’s most ambitious cultural institution yet.
Editor’s note: This essay is available in our print issue, Reimagining Nigerian Heritage. Buy the issue here.
Museums should be about living practice and not just works with past, static lives,’ Ore Disu, the director of the institute at the Museum of West African Art (MOWAA), thought on a humid afternoon in Benin, Edo State. It was the second day of the two-day preview the museum had organized in early November 2024. The preview, tagged ‘Museum in the Making’, had invited artists, scholars and cultural practitioners from across Nigeria, Africa, and the broader diaspora to the MOWAA campus—a sprawling active construction site—that is set to officially open in 2025. Among the campus’s facilities was a nearly finished ‘main building’ that housed an auditorium, along with a range of technical rooms, including climate-controlled collections stores, labs for material testing and art conservation, facilities for field archaeology, and a library. ‘We have had events in the past, but it is the first time we’ve hosted in Benin City, on this scale,’ Disu, who I spoke with both in Benin during the preview—we shared a panel—and days later on a Zoom call, said. According to Disu, ‘Opening our doors when the building isn’t quite finished, the conversations, the workshops—all of these geared towards this notion of museum building as a collective, evolving endeavour.’
For over a decade, Disu has been mapping a unique journey through the field of heritage management. After working as a freelance writer and researcher, in 2012 she founded the Nsibidi Institute (Nsibidi). It was a cultural think tank and, according to her, ‘a direct response to what I perceived as a dearth of reflective spaces in Nigeria outside of politics.’ Nsibidi had its challenges and its ground-breaking moments, all of which contributed to Disu’s interest in non-conventional approaches to thinking about African heritage. Presently, as director of the institute at MOWAA, she recognizes and invites discourse surrounding the problematic legacies museums have had in Africa. Additionally, she sees an opportunity to reimagine the museum, not simply as a place where knowledge is held or contained but as an active contributor to local knowledge systems.
Under Disu’s guidance, MOWAA embraces an expansive view of heritage beyond the historical objects the West value and stole from Africa to include natural environments such as rainforests. While such natural heritage is still present in our local communities, they are rapidly being lost due to a lack of information, weak regulatory systems, and unchecked, rapacious capitalism. ‘Our starting point,’ she explained, ‘was to revisit how we define cultural value, focusing on precolonial African perspectives, geographical boundaries and religion before Eurocentric values shaped these definitions.’
As such, central to MOWAA’s mission is disrupting and reversing colonial paradigms in museum practices. ‘Why can’t [the flow of objects] be reversed … through loans, exchanges and traveling exhibitions?’ Disu asked, insisting that MOWAA must ‘serve as a conduit for African institutions to be more active in global practice.’
MOWAA, it is evident, cannot be an ordinary museum. A $100-million-dollar project (of which MOWAA has raised 20 per cent), MOWAA is uniquely positioned to lead knowledge creation and heritage management, not just in Benin City but across Africa at large. Like many, I wondered about the decision to identify as a museum but, according to Disu, there are obvious, practical advantages. For one, she explained that the museum label ‘provides a more direct way for people to immediately understand what you are referring to, leaving the details of what kind of museum you are up to the space, experiences and contents you emphasize.’ It reminded me of the novelist, Chinua Achebe, who was often asked why he chose to write in English—like English, the museum was a colonizing instrument. Once, Achebe responded: ‘Let no one be fooled by the fact that we may write in English, for we intend to do unheard of things with it.’
When MOWAA officially launches in 2025, it will launch without a collection. Not starting with a collection, Disu explained, ‘is an opportunity to disrupt notions of a museum being defined tightly around a collection. We’re disrupting the notion of museums as exclusive domains for experts, embracing broader sectoral and community participation.’ MOWAA, following Achebe, seems poised to do ‘unheard of things’.
During our conversation, Disu and I discussed her vision for MOWAA; MOWAA’s ongoing and forthcoming initiatives, including its sensitive work with Western institutions such as the British Museum; and its learnings from active African institutions such as Red Clay Studio in Ghana, Raw Material Company in Senegal, and the Guest Artist Space (G.A.S.) Foundation in Nigeria; and MOWAA’s ambitions to disrupt the global cultural landscape as we know it. Our full interview continues below...
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