Brothers and Sisters is an exhibition and publication by Roeland Otten centered on venavi figures: wooden statuettes from the Ewe culture in West Africa, created to commemorate deceased siblings of twins.
Brothers and Sisters begins with a simple question: now that these objects are (nevertheless) here, how might we look at them?
Rather than viewing the venavi figures solely as ethnographic artifacts or exotic curiosities, the project proposes approaching them as carriers of ideas about family, presence, and time. They embody a worldview in which the boundary between the living and the dead is porous, and in which relationships do not end when someone disappears.