The city of Dortmund in Germany is the setting for an unprecedented museum exhibition of looted art and reclamation of history from a colonial context organized by Nana Oforiatta Ayim, an art historian from Ghana. Ayim wants to use her exhibitions to question the traditional understanding of museums and to introduce new perspectives.

For the exhibition, “EFIE: The Museum as Home”, held at the Dortmunder U culture center, brings works by contemporary African artists side by side with colonial looted art to narrate a story of home, loss of home, and the soul of African art objects, because, according to Ayim, these historical art pieces weren’t like “inanimate things to be put in glass cases — they have a spirit, they were dynamic, they were alive, and the structures they were in were homes for them."

Thus, the Ghanaian art curator, who is also Ghana's commissioner for restitution, has designed this exhibition to create a space of healing for the historical artifacts (on loan from German collections) and put them in settings that are close to how they had been in their natural homes. The exhibition’s title, Efie–meaning home in the Twi language, is a pointer to Ayim’s intention to reposition the displaced artifacts back to their source spaces.

“What is most important is to come to terms with history and regain control over one's own narrative,” she told DW, pointing out that the objects were stolen using varying degrees of violence. "There's a separation that's happened between us and our histories and our narratives." Ayim hopes to help ease the pain of separation by inserting this "in-between step before the objects come back [to Ghana]."

To further deepen the theme of reclaiming one's own history, Ayim has carefully selected eight contemporary African artists for the show in Dortmund. They include Kuukua Eshun, Afroscope, El Anatsui, Diego Arauja, Rita Mawuena Benissan, Kwasi Darko, Na Chainkua Reindorf, and Studio Nyali. The works by these artists, exploring different perspectives of the concept of home, come in forms ranging from sculptures to paintings.

Arguing that people don't feel connected to the museum, but they will come to cultural festivals by the thousands not necessarily due to a lack of interest but due to the form of presentation, Ayim employed a mobile bamboo structure that can be expanded and used for a variety of projects to showcase the works in order to infuse a Ghanaian essence into the exhibition.

The “fufuzela” as this structure is called, is built to resemble a typical Ghanaian kiosk and was originally developed by DK Osseo Asare for Ayim’s mobile museums in Ghana.