3 Exhibitions

IIP produced three exhibitions titled Invisible Inventories - Questioning Kenyan Collections in Western Museums as part of its effort to make its research accessible to the public and to further the debate surrounding Kenyan objects held outside of Kenya.

Through contemporary artworks and academic research, the artists and scholars involved in the exhibition project approached the question of how to make objects — which currently reside in institutions within the global North — present again in contemporary Kenya.
 

National Museums of Kenya, Nairobi (18.03.- 02.05.2021)
Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum, Cologne (28.05.-19.08.2021)
Weltkulturen Museum, Frankfurt (06.10.2021-09.01.2022)

The exhibitions reached over 5,000 people, who came physically to the exhibition venues, and many more who followed the events online. 

More than 9,000 objects in our online database

The database is a core element of the project. Over the past 3 years IIP has contacted museums from around the world, requesting them to share data of the Kenyan objects in their collections.

The database currently includes over 32,000 objects from thirty institutions worldwide. Almost 7,000 objects from nine museum collections are now published online and the rest will be continuously being updated over the coming months. This database serves as a tool to make Kenyas heritage accessible for researchers and stakeholders globally and allow Kenyan communities to quickly locate their cultural heritage.

Explore the database here.

IIP is winding down, so it's time to sum up.

After the last exhibition in January 2022 and with the database steadily growing, it is time to sum up IIP so far.

Over the last four years the International Inventories Programme, an international research and database project, investigated a corpus of Kenyan objects held in institutions across the globe. This cooperation, between the two artist's collectives (THE NEST and SHIFT), three museums (National Museums of Kenya, Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum, Weltkulturen Museum) and the Goethe-Institut, realised various projects.

8 Object Movement Dialogues

In November 2018 International Inventories Programme initiated the “Object Movement Dialogues” (OMDs), a series of  public forums to foster discourse on critical object histories and the far reaching consequences of their often violent movement across borders. Over the last 3 years we have realised 8 OMDs with a range of Kenyan and international guests which had different thematic foci and inquired into the social, political and legal issues around object movement, both with scholarly experts and representatives from the communities of origin.

You can find them here.