Nora Al-Badri, “The Post-Truth Museum,” 2021–23

The face of the former director of the British Museum is on my laptop screen declaring, improbably, that he wants “radically to redefine the role of the arts and museums.” The video cuts to the former director of the Musée du Louvre, who proclaims that “all the well-paid positions at art institutions shall be transferred to those who bear the legacy of the violence committed to them over centuries.” Next up is the president of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. “We have realized that the Humboldt Forum is ethically indefensible,” he concedes, so his role will now be to return the stolen objects and turn over the museum for accommodation for refugees.

These strange statements are part of The Post-Truth Museum (2021–23), a work by German Iraqi artist Nora Al-Badri, which uses AI to create these deepfake videos, disrupting and flipping the messaging of the museum leadership. Ethical questions about misinformation, disinformation, and identity theft are rolled together with the unfinished history of so-called ethnological museums that for more than a century have taken it upon themselves to speak for other people, to tell history by speaking over the past, and to claim the rightful possession of stolen art and culture. The work shines a light on what it would mean for a European museum of “world culture” to tell the truth in the 2020s. In these legacy colonial institutions, a new form of that famous problem of Greek logic, the Epimenides paradox, is in play. It’s not exactly a case of a museum director saying: All directors are liars. Instead, audiences, stakeholders, and communities are starting to ask: Could the museum just be telling a few self-evident truths in order to keep the fictions on which it is founded intact?

Nora Al-Badri, “The Post-Truth Museum,” 2021–23

The Post-Truth Museum adds to a growing body of artistic and activist interventions where the moving image is used to address questions of truth and fiction in Europe’s self-styled “world culture” or “universal” museums. For example, Mwazulu Diyabanza has staged “thefts” of stolen items, and filmed himself taking objects from display in the Musée du Quai Branly and the Afrika Museum in Berg en Dal – actions that index scenes in the 2018 Hollywood movie Black Panther and the 1979 Nigerian movie The Mask, questioning who the thief really is. [1] In July 2024, a Brazilian artist named Ilê Sartuzi stole a coin from the British Museum, switching it for a forgery and placing the original in the donation box before leaving. [2] And in Berlin, Priya Basil’s work Locked In and Out premiered at the virtual opening of the Humboldt Forum on 16 December 2020, employing an approach that she has described as “fabulography.” [3] Such video work chimes with the rich seam of writing and research that takes inspiration from the “critical fabulation” of Saidiya Hartman, and from the film-essays of Isaac Julien. [4] Julien’s work in particular intervenes with the past both politically and experimentally, not with the fact-based approach of a documentary but with the power of the imagination. His work inhabits “a poetical space that,” as he has put it, “is simultaneously fiction and documentary.” [5] In “world culture” museums, meanwhile, the blending of the real and the fake has become stranger than fiction. The idea that they are “universal museums” is, after all, an invention of the 21st century – a faux-historical terminology cooked up in 2003 in a desperate effort to justify the continued warehousing of so much of the cultural heritage of the globe, through a lightly fictionalized account of museums’ historical relationship with the project of the Encyclopédistes. [6]

In the closing seconds of the The Post-Truth Museum, Al-Badri notes that two of these three men have recently stepped down from their directorships. In Paris, news reports described how Jean-Luc Martinez was arrested in an investigation into allegedly looted Egyptian antiquities and “gang fraud.” [7] In London, Hartwig Fischer resigned after news broke about the thefts and sale of thousands of items from the British Museum collection by one of its own curators (curators which the museum still, with no hint of irony, continues to call “keepers”). [8] But in Berlin, the ongoing tenure of Herr Prof. Dr. Hermann Parzinger is complicit in the strangest warps in reality, as his museum curators re-display “world culture” from imperial thefts hand-in-hand with the idea of restitution in the newly constructed colonial palace, where the architectural pastiche combines the Baroque with the modern. Go and visit the Humboldt Forum. If you can bear it, that is, and if you can get the visa to enter Germany in the first place. [9] Leave your bag in the locker as you must, go up the escalators two floors, and find your way to Room 210. In large letters on the wall, in all-caps, are the words THE FUTURE OF THE BENIN BRONZES. A row of ten screens with talking heads includes a recording of Parzinger which is strangely reminiscent of what his AI counterpart says in Al-Badri’s video work. He promises, as the dodgy English translation on the display screen puts it, “complete restitution of property regarding all the Benin Bronzes now situated in the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin,” with provisions for ongoing “circulation” and “exchange” to allow the displays to remain in Berlin. [10] In the next gallery, some of the looted sacred royal artworks are on display. This elegant legerdemain, this neocolonial misdirection, is a finessed project in art-wash. There is a sense of what Sara Ahmed has called “the nonperformativity of anti-racism”: when describing institutional speech acts, like a university committing to equality, for example, that are read as performatives but do not do what they say. And there is a new agenda of cultural counterinsurgency, through which the language and gestures of restitution are embraced, co-opted, depoliticized, and thus diminished and controlled by a small gang of the richest and most powerful museums in the world. [11] If you visit Room 210, try sitting on the bench in the middle of the room and playing The Post-Truth Museum on your phone as the official video of Parzinger runs. The museum is through the looking glass. Forget the unknown unknowns; forget those deeply parochial claims to universalism; forget the attempts to art-wash the colonial continuum; this is about the genuine untruths. It’s time to get real.

Nora Al-Badri, “The Post-Truth Museum,” 2021–23

Nora Al-Badri’s The Post-Truth Museum is a provocation to think through the typologies of untruths that are encountered in the “world culture” museum today: the silencings, the misdirections, the misrepresentations, the fake universalisms, the downright lies. The work challenges museum curators to fold the classificatory logic of their institutions back onto their own untruths. Analogical thinking might offer one way to do so: The ethnological museum always held something in common with the national border; both were 19th-century technologies for the classification of people, one using cultural objects, the other human bodies. As the border is to the nation, so the museum is to empire. [12] This was never clearer than when, in the 20th century, across Europe, displays of human skulls were removed from natural history museums as curators dismantled the instrumentalization of their institutions for the failed project of the fake “race science.” Never clearer, that is, until today. Because in the 2020s a parallel process is now underway for museums of cultural history, a process of addressing the latent, inherited structures not of biological supremacy but of cultural supremacy, unsettling Europe’s enduring colonial inheritance. [13] Analogies may well be important if the lies that museums keep repeating are to be resisted: lies so old that they don’t even sound like lies anymore because they’ve been repeated so many times.

One more analogy then, learned from how artists like Nora Al-Badri are resisting and subverting the legacy colonial regimes of display, politics, and commissioning. As a curator in one of these ethnological museums myself, I often think of them as akin to an artwork. For this analogy to work, however, it’s important not to mistake the museum for a purely representational form, as if it were a realistic painting or sketchbook of landscapes and portraits. The museum is also a durational form, part performative, part sculptural: a time-based medium just like the video work it might commission. Now the past is catching up with it. The monumentalism of its untruths demands new forms of counter-monumentalization. The nonperformativity of the new counterinsurgent phantasms to be found in “world culture” museums today is being met with resistance – through speech acts, gestures, bodies, feet, hands, heads. Al-Badri’s work begins to frame those possibilities, and in doing so it contributes to a wider, emerging, growing, unstoppable movement that occupies museums as places to intervene with unfinished, counterinsurgent colonialism, marshalling the resources of the imagination against fake realities to get real in the legacy colonial museum.

Nora Al-Bardi, The Post-Truth Museum, 2021–23.

Dan Hicks is curator and professor of contemporary archaeology at the University of Oxford, and a fellow of St Cross College, Oxford. His next book, Every Monument Will Fall, will be published by Hutchinson Heinemann (Penguin) in 2025.

Image credit: Courtesy of Nora Al-Badri