Looted objects held captive in museums and archives represent only a fraction of the mass colonial plunder of Africa. Substantial wealth has been accumulated through the extraction of raw materials, labor, knowledge, and skills throughout the continent, including the co-option of what acclaimed author, art curator, and filmmaker Ariella Aïsha Azoulay has labeled “visual wealth” attained by putting people in front of the colonizers’ cameras. This long and enduring ransack cannot be addressed through the discourse or act of restitution alone, especially when arguments are only made in support of the return of individual objects. Rather, we must question the imperial structures of the world in which we live. Within the wide landscape opened by this questioning, Azoulay’s new film, the world like a jewel in the hand–unlearning imperial plunder ii (2022), focuses on the destruction of the Jewish Muslim world that existed in North Africa. The film insists on making it imaginable and inhabitable again. 

As a sequel to her Un-Documented–Unlearning Imperial Plunder (2019), Azoulay uses the camera to question, and thus refuse, the way Algerian Jews, like herself and other Jews who live(d) in other Muslim countries, are transformed into an extinct species as museums display their plundered objects as artifacts of a bygone world. Instead of accepting this verdict and treating these documents as sealed or these objects as relics of “history,” the film presents them as invitations to others to resist, reinterpret, and reclaim a world deemed “lost.”

The expect the screening of the world like a jewel in the hand (58 mins) to be followed by a conversation between Carin Kuoni, Vera List Center Senior Director/Chief Curator, and the filmmaker, via Zoom. It is presented as part of the Vera List Center’s 2022–2024 Focus Theme Correction*.  The film includes English-language open captions and subtitles. Please note that this event has limited capacity and will be seated first come, first seated.

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay is an author, art curator, filmmaker, and theorist of photography and visual culture. She is a professor of Modern Culture and Media and Comparative Literature at Brown University and an independent curator of Archives and Exhibitions. Most recently, her work The Natural History of Rape was shown at the Berlin Biennale 2022, and Errata at Tapiès Foundation, 2019 and HKW, Berlin, 2020. Her most recent book, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, was published by Verso Books, 2019. the world like a jewel in the hand is her fifth film.