In February of 2016, Hyperallergic reported that two artists secretly 3D-scanned the heavily guarded bust of Queen Nefertiti at the Neues Museum in Berlin, and released the files to the public as a free download.

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German-Iraqi artist Nora Al-Badri and German artist Jan Nikolai Nelles framed their clandestine project as an act of cultural repatriation since the museum kept scans of the bust hidden from the public and even banned visitors from taking photos of it.

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A month later, claims surfaced that the scans were not original, as the artists initially claimed, and that they were obtained by hacking the museum’s servers. The artists neither confirmed nor denied the allegations. Now, after a three-year-long Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) effort in Germany, the official scans of the artifact have been released under a Creative Commons license. Behind the newly released […]

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