How to give back a stolen glance probes the inadequacies of repatriation, framed by the impossibility of its central question: How do we return a glance that has been stolen? Implicit in the act of restitution (the return of a stolen object) is the assumption that the object alone was taken. Such material gestures fail to address the far more violent, complex, and toxic relations binding the Global North and Global South. Performed as strategies of distraction and deferral, restitution risks re-fetishising the very objects it claims to liberate.

The video depicts gloved hands rearranging cut-out images of looted artefacts hoarded within the British Museum’s collection (including the Benin Bronzes, Parthenon Marbles, and Maqdala Cross) against a green-screen backdrop. This staging parodies the processes of abstraction first initiated by the London Missionary Society and sustained through the visual regimes of the museum complex. Interrupting the video’s frame are cuts to a video documentating two agreements signed in Colombo in 2023 between the Netherlands and Sri Lanka, which facilitated the return of six artefacts looted from the Kandyan Kingdom during the Dutch invasion of 1765 and later hoarded in the Rijksmuseum. The video’s frame zooms in on the hand gestures of Gunay Uslu (State Secretary for Culture and Media, Netherlands) and Vidura Wickramanayake (Minister of Buddhasasana, Religious and Cultural Affairs, Sri Lanka): resting on a wooden table, clasped in a handshake, marking their signatures, gesturing at a lectern. These formalised, rehearsed movements echo the sanitised choreography of the video’s gloved figure.