About
Dr. Jonathan Fine provides general guidance and oversight and, along with Prof. Dr. Barbara Plankensteiner, introduced the project to the Benin Dialogue Group. He assisted in the coordination and negotiation of legal agreements with the institutions.
Jonathan Fine is director of the Weltmuseum Wien. Before coming to Vienna in 2021, he served as head of collections (Museumsleiter) and curator for the collections from West Africa, Cameroon, Gabon, and Namibia at the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin. Fine’s scholarly and curatorial work has focused on colonialism and museum collections, with an emphasis on works of art and cultural objects from West and Central Africa. He is one of the authors of the German Museums Association guidelines for collections from colonial contexts and is chair of the Advisory Committee for Guidelines for Collections in Austrian Federal Museums from Colonial Contexts. Fine holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School.
Digital Benin collates digital material from institutions, and some of this material is inherently colonial and contains words, terms and phrases that are inaccurate, derogatory and harmful towards African and African diasporic communities. Catalogue transcriptions, book titles, exhibition titles and museum titles may contain harmful terms. We recognise the potential for the material to cause physical and mental distress as well as evoke strong emotions. Owing to the scale of the collection’s data, a process to implement sensitive-content warnings in the displayed data is still incomplete. The material within the catalogue does not represent Digital Benin’s views. Digital Benin maintains a strong anti-colonial, anti-racist position and affirms its support for centring the humanity of historically marginalised and disenfranchised communities. Read more about the background of this statement here