GESTURES OF (RE)PAIR: TOWARDS A MUSEUM THAT BELONGS

This seminar is a continuation of the winter semester 2025-26. It includes excursions during which students will bring their (non)museum/institution to life.

In a majority of contexts, the frameworks through which museums have historically operated are deeply entangled with colonial conquest, imperial violence, and the epistemological dominance of the West. Whether ethnographic, natural history, or so-called “universal” art institutions, museums have not only collected but also extracted. They have not only protected but also erased. They have not only displayed but also distorted. Contemporary art museums are also not free from these entanglements.

While the previous semester focused on the inherent violence in historical museum practices as a starting point, this semester aims to activate a new model existing beyond the frameworks of Western museology. Thinking alongside interventions such as “Decolonise this Place”, artistic practices such as Meschack Gaba’s “Museum of Contemporary African Art”, as well as multiple contemporary artistic examples and theoretical texts, students are invited to reimagine and activate a new (non)structure; one that is able to listen and belong. A living, breathing, morphing and expansive structure. Through a deep engagement with ritual, oral tradition, storytelling, sonic memory, and speculative thinking, we will explore, during our excursions, how knowledge systems rooted in indigenous and diasporic cosmologies from the Global Majority can offer alternative conceptions of how a future museum can become a non-structured, de-institutionalised, and fluid entity. A place of convergence that understands that sometimes objects sing and weep, that the archive sweats, and that architectures need to breathe. A site where knowledge is not fixed but felt, and where the death of the institution is not feared but welcomed. A n entity that is brave enough to collapse, generous enough to transform, and rooted enough to be shaped by the worlds it seeks to belong to.

Previous seminar guests included the artist, activist, and co-founder of Decolonise This Place, Nitasha Dhillon; the independent curator, educator, and art historian Dr Nontobeko Ntombela; and the community organizer, activist, and co-founder of TWM Bibliotheek and PROUD Event, Glenda Obermuller.

Selected Readings:

Tuck & Yang (2012), “Decolonisation is not a Metaphor” (Link)

Azoulay (2019), “Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism” (download link)

Sharpe (2016), “In the Wake: On Blackness and Being” (pdf link)

Moten & Harney (2013), The Undercommons. (pdf link)

Françoise Verges, Paul Gilroy and Melissa Thackway (2024),

A Programme of Absolute Disorder: Decolonizing the Museum,

Lonetree (2012), Decolonizing Museums.
Lorde (1979), The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master's House

Spivak (1988), Can the Subaltern Speak? (link)

Sylvia Wynter (2003), Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom

Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999), Decolonizing Methodologies
Gilmore, Ruth Wilson (2007),


Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. University of California Press

Sinthujan Varatharajah) & Moshtari Hilal (2024), Hierarchies of Solidarity

Caroline Hamilton et al (2007), The Politics and Aesthetics of Refusal

Further References:

Do Cultural Institutions Repair or Reproduce Violence? (link)

Museum of Contemporary African Art: Meshack Gaba

The Museum of Black Futures:

Nula: Irena Haiduk

Strike MoMA (& other interventions): Decolonise this Place

Museum of Non-Permanence (donna Kukama)

Museum of European Cultures: donna Kukama

The Vocal Museum: Masello Motana

Mining the Museum: Fred Wilson (pdf link)