Conference Museum Conversations

Africa's museums at a turning point: The exhibition and presentation of African collections, still largely influenced by colonial thinking, urgently calls for a contemporary and critical redefinition. In the “Museum Conversations” series­, the Goethe-Institut brings together experts from African countries to jointly develop Africa's museums of the future.
 
The aim of the Museum Conversations initiated by the Goethe-Institut is to build an intra-African network of regional and international museum experts. The conferences lasting several days bring together curators, artists and historians and take place annually in a different African country, having so far been held in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Namibia.
 
Each new meeting begins where the past conferences ended and deepens the discussion about innovative museum models, the return of cultural goods and the possibility of involving the public more intensively in the museum's work. The museum experts discuss no less than the future of African museums from a post-colonial perspective.
 
The Museum Conversations are a series of projects of the Goethe-Institutes in sub-Saharan Africa and take place at venues in the participating countries in cooperation with national museums, museum associations, ministries and UNESCO. The participating institutions see themselves as facilitators of an intra-African discourse on the institution of the museum in the post-colonial era.