Artists Want to Recreate a Controversial "Human Zoo" as an Art Display for the Anniversary of Norway's Constitution

Mohamed Ali Fadlabi and Lars Cuzner think that it's important for Norway to remember the "Congo Village" of 1914.

Not Available Lead
Complex Original

Image via Complex Original

Not Available Lead

For the 200th anniversary of the signing of Norway's constitution, artists Mohamed Ali Fadlabi and Lars Cuzner are planning an art project in Oslo that references a part of the country's history that many would like to forget. In 1914 for the 100th anniversary, 80 Africans were put on display in a human zoo and well over a million people came to see them paraded around like animals.

On the European Attraction Limited website, Fadlabi and Cuzner say that the purpose of their exhibition will be to "confront a neglected aspect of the past that still contributes to our present" and to "investigate the linear or non-linear (whatever the case may be) connection between the messages of racial superiority that lined the intentions of the human zoos in the past to a more contemporary idea of superiority of goodness." As to be expected, not everyone is in support of their project, but they have received funding from Public Art Norway and have issued a call for volunteers to participate with the re-enactment on May 15. The EAL site encourages people to read the texts and watch the discussion videos by curators and professors before signing up.

RELATED: "Human Zoo" in India Lets Tourists Throw Bananas at Natives 

[via The Art Newspaper]

Latest in Style