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

September 18-19, 2025
Paris, France

For more information about the panels and participants, please go here.

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.

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?

DAY 1: Thursday 9/18, 2025

1.15 PM: Lunch

3.00 PM: Introduction by Laetitia Zecchini (CNRS)

Panel 1 | 3.15 PM: Re-envisioning / Re-signifiying Colonial Archives 1
Chair: Paulo Horta (NYU Abu Dhabi) 

Marc Maillot (ISAC / UChicago): Staging the East: Orientalist Photography in Chicago Collections – An ISAC special exhibition as a case study’.

Josephine McDonagh (UChicago) and Jonathan Sachs (Concordia): Oscar Wilde in the Paper Museum: Illustrated Books, Gift Exchange, and Colonial and Post-colonial Exhibition Practices

Neelam Srivastava (Newcastle University): The Museum of Opacities: Re-signifying Italy’s Colonial Artefacts

5.00 PM: Tea & Coffee

Panel 2 | 5.30 PM:  Re-invisioning / Re-signifying Colonial Archives 2
Chair: Shrutakirti Dutta (UChicago)

Rahaab Allana (Alkazi Foundation, New Delhi): Imaging Displacement

Ada Ackerman (CNRS): Decolonial Potentialities of Generative AI

DAY 2: Friday 9/19, 2025

9.00 AM: Coffee

Panel 3 | 9.30 AM: Art & Print as/and Activism
Chair: Robert Young (NYU)

Hayley G. Toth (Newcastle University): Protest Art or Collaborative Ephemera? Exhibiting Black Activism at Chicago History Museum

Sergio Delgado Moya (UChicago): ‘Profane Relics’: Print Sediments in Chilean Visual Art from the Years of the Dictatorship

10.45 to 11.00 AM: Break

Toral Jatin Gajarawala (NYU):  Lost in the world, how innocent you are: The Black Nudes

Nontobeko Ntombela (Wits University):Contrapuntally: The Curatorial Nightmare of Tribe, Ethnicity, and Africanity in Contemporary Art

12.30 PM: Lunch

Panel 4 | 2.00 PM: Curatorial Strategies and Dilemmas
Chair: Daniel Foliard (UPCité) 

Margaux Lavernhe (EHESS, Paris): Showing James Barnor, from Europe to Ghana: Constructing a Body of Work Across Shifting Contexts.

Titas De Sarkar (UChicago):  (on zoom) Capturing the Guerilla-fighter: Mrinal Sen, from Archive to Exhibition 

3.15 PM: Tea & Coffee

Panel 5 | 3.45 PM Institutions and Periodicals on Display
Chair: Stefano Evangelisto (Oxford)

Adom Getachew (University of Chicago): Circulations from Panafrica  

Devika Singh (Courtauld Institute of Art, London):  Periodicals on display / Quand les revues s’exposent

Elisabeth ‘Liz’ Gomis (Maison des mondes africains, Paris): From La Revue du Monde Noire to MansA: Afro-Diasporic Periodicals as Living Archives