Kota: Digital Excavations in African Art presents a powerful installation of nearly fifty Kota reliquary guardian figures—unique wood-and-metal sculptures created to protect the bones of deceased ancestors. The exhibition examines a digital database created by Belgian computer engineer and independent researcher Frederic Cloth, whose combination of close-looking and data-driven analysis yielded unexpected conclusions and new hypotheses about the hidden histories of Kota figures.

Co-curated by Cloth and Kristina Van Dyke, a specialist in African art, Kota is the first exhibition to examine Cloth’s search engine and system of algorithms, as well as the first to focus exclusively on Kota reliquary guardians outside of the broader context of African sculpture.