Colonial Laws Still Shape Archive Ownership, Says Jihan El Tahri at Kochi Biennale

KOCHI:
Arguing that colonial-era legal doctrines continue to determine who owns vast collections of African images and film footage, award-winning filmmaker and visual artist Jihan El Tahri called for the legal, ethical and political contestation of European archival control over colonial records.

Delivering the public lecture, titled “Restituting Fragments of Evidence”, at the Pavilion, Bastion Bungalow, Fort Kochi, as part of the Vivan Sundaram memorial lecture series organised by the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, El Tahri examined how historical images became property; and how the frameworks that enabled colonial dispossession continue to influence contemporary archive ownership.

Tracing the issue back to the doctrine of terra nullius, she noted that it was this legal fiction that enabled King Leopold II to claim the Congo Free State as his private domain. The doctrine gained international legitimacy during the Berlin Conference, where European powers formalised rules for the partition of Africa, treating inhabited territories as legally unclaimed.

Although colonialism was later condemned by the UN through United Nations General Assembly Resolution 1514 in 1960, El Tahri argued that the administrative laws and sovereignty doctrines under which colonial archives were assembled still structure their retention in European institutions.

“European archives still legally own colonial images,” she said, pointing out the contradiction between the formal denunciation of colonialism and the continued legal control over its visual records. “The ownership of colonial photographs and reels can, and should, be contested.”

Opening her talk with the question, “How is it that the image became property?”, El Tahri reflected on her four-decade-long engagement with archives. Quoting Saidiya Hartman’s essay Venus in Two Acts, she invoked the line, “The loss of stories sharpens the hunger for them,” to underline the fragmentary nature of historical records.

She recounted her early years as a war photographer during the civil war in Lebanon in the 1980s, when she believed that a single iconic image could transmit the truth of an entire conflict. She cited globally recognised photographs such as Napalm Girl from the Vietnam War, the imagery of the Carnation Revolution in Portugal, and the lone protester known as Tank Man at Tiananmen Square, as moments when images appeared to alter political consciousness.

However, El Tahri said her faith in the singular, decisive image gradually gave way to a deeper engagement with archival fragments, from flea markets in Egypt to institutional collections, where missing metadata, unknown authorship and silent subjects complicate interpretation.

Drawing again on Hartman’s idea of “critical fabulation”, she questioned who has the authority to interpret and reconstruct histories embedded in incomplete archives. She argued that the right to bridge gaps in historical evidence should not remain confined to Western scholars with privileged access to institutions.

Engaging the archive, she clarified, is not about nostalgia but about equipping the present with tools to reinterpret reality and imagine alternative futures. Invoking the Akan concept of Sankofa, a bird that moves forward while looking back, she said meaningful progress requires confronting the past.

“If laws were updated in 1976 and again in 1998,” she noted, referring to shifts in global intellectual property frameworks, “they can be revisited again.” The question, she suggested, is whether institutions and nations are willing to insist on that change.

The lecture formed part of the Biennale’s continuing efforts to foreground debates on memory, restitution and the politics of representation within global art discourse.