Quai Branly Museum – Discover Africa collections

An entire continent within sight …

The Quai Branly Museum houses one of the largest collections of African arts in the world, with nearly 70,000 objects from the Maghreb, sub-Saharan Africa and Madagascar. Approximately 1200 m2, the visitor accesses a thousand works of exceptional richness and variety, for the first time together in a single location, allowing a fruitful relationship between styles, cultures and stories.

Developed from 1999 by a working group of the teams of the Museum of Man and of the National Museum of African and Oceanic Arts, the museum of African collections offers two approaches to the visitor: a geographical journey, which invites a journey across the continent from north to south; a thematic route, to discover the works and consider them as their uses and production techniques. This approach has remarkably original exhibition areas: the many “boxes” projecting from the north façade, forming small study rooms devoted to a family of objects or theme, such as divination. A number of essential features also help to facilitate understanding of the works and their meanings, the history of the region and that its contacts with other cultures. Contextualization uses the form of maps, travel books and extracts multimedia supports, numerous audiovisual and photographic documents… >> read more