Museum conversations (2018-2020)

“Museum Conversations” 2019 in Namibia | Photo (detail): CreativeLab for Goethe-Institut Namibia In the “Museum conversations” series the Goethe-Institut brought together international museum experts to collaborate on the development of Africa’s museums of the future.

The exhibition of African collections, which is still largely influenced by colonial thinking, urgently needed a contemporary and critical redefinition. These conferences each lasted several days and brought together curators, artists and historians to build an intra-African network of regional and international museum experts. The Museum Conversations were held in seven African countries: Ruanda, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Namibia.

The museum experts discussed the future of African museums from a post-colonial perspective to initiate an intra-African discourse on the museum as an institution in the post-colonial era.

Participants attended the closing event for Museum Conversations, an international public conference in Windhoek. The conference highlighted that the African partners wanted to ask questions about the future of their museums, addressing issues beyond the restitution debate.