ELEPHANTs & SQUIRRELS

Are human remains museum objects? In Basel, a Sri Lankan artist questions restitution and our relationship with colonial collections.

For over a century, human remains and ritual objects taken from Sri Lanka by naturalists Paul and Fritz Sarasin have been kept in Swiss museums. Sri Lankan artist Deneth P. Veda Arachchige joins the Wanniyala-Aththo people’s struggle to reclaim them, drawing on ancestral memory and the traces of the colonial past in her own artistic practice. Without simplifying the issues at stake, Gregor Brändli brings together historians, museum curators and representatives of the Indigenous community. Led by Deneth’s luminous presence, Elephants & Squirrels goes beyond the question of restitution to ask what it means to remember, take responsibility for history and repair a dispossession.