It is thanks to the fetish of a thief that he only fits as many perfectly made relics as he can on his boat trip back, that he leaves the sculptor’s lines and unfinished works for us to celebrate. I gazed upon the other unfinished Nefertiti’s head, which is believed to be made by the same sculptor millenniums ago. It was the sculptor’s unfinished creation. Celebrated in her homeland.
One of my favourite statements by Nora Al Badri, a German-Iraqi artist, made her project about Nefertiti in 2015, in which she hid a technical 3D scanner in her jacket and went inside the Neues Museum in Berlin. She illegally scanned Nefertiti’s bust. It was her way to deprive the museum of their monopoly and constant rejection of Egypt’s appeals to bring her back to us. Nora coloured a 3D printed bust as a near-perfect replica, then made the rite of burying it as a counter act to the excavation in an undisclosed location, never to be found again.