Postcolonial Print Cultures: Exhibition-Making, Museography and Textual/Visual Interactions

September 18-19, 2025
Paris, France

This workshop of the IRNPPC would like to address the interaction of print and other media associated with visuality in the field of postcolonial print cultures, focusing on practices of exhibition-making and publishing. Museums as we know are epistemic sites, and this event builds on all the previous work discussing the role of museums as a colonial ‘form of knowledge,’ and a colonial institution consolidating Europe’s so-called “civilizational mission”, but also as critical sites of new national narratives, representations and counter-histories, often driven by a decolonial gesture / intervention (cf. the question of restitution)..

We would like to explore the practices, forms and uses of colonial/postcolonial print from the Global South in the colonial exhibitions and world fairs of the turn of the 19th century, up to our postcolonial/decolonial present, and explore how the  interaction of textual and visual registers are an integral part of exhibition-making and postcolonial print cultures.

How are colonial and postcolonial print ephemera, media and literatures staged and displayed, put to use, consumed and repurposed/revalued/re-curated in museums and exhibition spaces today, beyond their simple documentary function/status – and to what means / ends? How is the history of the often predatory and asymmetrical modes of acquisition, collecting and cataloging of African, Asian, Oceanian or American material, and the ethnological gaze that presided over these practices contested or pluralized, recast, reframed and reinvented? And what becomes of the postcolonial/colonial print archive (texts, periodicals, photographs, etc.) when it becomes art? What are the inventive and improvisational curatorial and publishing practices used both by many postcolonial/modernist writers, artists and publishers who work(ed) at the intersection of different arts and artistic practices, and by curators today?

We invite short presentations on these and related topics. We also invite contributions from curators to discuss recent and current projects/exhibitions and the challenges facing curatorial practice today.