Colonial laws still shape archive ownership, says Jihan El Tahri at Kochi Biennale

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.

Lecture Context
- Jihan El Tahri, Egyptian-French filmmaker and visual artist, delivered a lecture titled “Restituting Fragments of Evidence” at the Pavilion, Bastion Bungalow, Fort Kochi.
- The talk was part of the Vivan Sundaram memorial lecture series at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale.

Core Argument
- El Tahri argued that colonial-era legal doctrines still shape archive ownership, particularly of African images and film footage.
- She highlighted the contradiction between the UN’s formal denunciation of colonialism (Resolution 1514, 1960) and the continued European legal control over colonial archives.
- She called for legal, ethical, and political contestation of this control.

Historical Framing
- Traced the issue to the doctrine of terra nullius, which enabled King Leopold II to claim the Congo Free State as his private domain.
- Explained how frameworks of colonial dispossession still influence contemporary archival retention in European institutions.

Reflections on Images
- Questioned: “How is it that the image became property?”
- Recounted her journey from war photography in Lebanon (1980s) to deeper archival work.
- Cited iconic images like Napalm Girl (Vietnam), Tank Man (Tiananmen Square), and Portugal’s Carnation Revolution as moments when images shaped political consciousness.
- Emphasized the fragmentary nature of archives, missing metadata, and contested authorship.

Philosophical Anchors
- Quoted Saidiya Hartman’s Venus in Two Acts: “The loss of stories sharpens the hunger for them.”
- Invoked the Akan concept of Sankofa (moving forward while looking back) to stress the need for confronting the past.
- Suggested that just as intellectual property laws were updated in 1976 and 1998, they can be revisited again.

Biennale’s Role
- The lecture reinforced the Biennale’s focus on memory, restitution, and the politics of representation in global art discourse.

El Tahri’s intervention is powerful because it links colonial legal fictions directly to today’s archival ownership battles.