Only 15 km from the centre of Brussels, the Africa Museum is located in a unique setting. The extraordinary diversity of the artwork collection and the historical heritage listed building, set in magnificent French style gardens, are nothing short of impressive.
Having recently undergone a substantial renovation, the museum is the ideal venue to absorb Africa's rich history as well as its art, its music, its rituals...
The delicate topics of the colonial history, sustainable development and biodiversity, have been given plenty of coverage. An important new feature since the refurbishment is the inclusion of contemporary art.
The new temporary exhibition Human Zoo. The age of colonial exhibitions recounts the now-forgotten history of people put on display as ‘living exhibits’, illustrated by exceptional images and documents that in some cases are on public view for the first time. While the exhibition focuses on the ‘Congolese villages’ of Tervuren, Antwerp (1885 and 1894) and Brussels (1958), it also zooms out to show the phenomenon’s truly global context. People from all over the world were exhibited in ‘human zoos’, and some lost their lives in the West.