Dan Hicks and Françoise Vergès
Dan Hicks and Françoise Vergès came together in Prishtina for a conversation on the role of museums, monuments, and cultural institutions in shaping public memory. In dialogue with one another, they reflected on the ways these institutions have historically been intertwined with colonial projects, the production of hierarchies of knowledge, and the unequal representation of different histories and cultures.Drawing on their research and critical scholarship, the conversation centred on what lies beyond the restitution of objects and materials looted during the colonial era. For Hicks and Vergès, decolonising the museum extends far beyond the physical return of collections; it also requires a more fundamental rethinking of the ways cultural institutions produce authority, shape collective memory, and construct historical narratives.
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Programme
In Conversation
Project Lead
Themes
Dan Hicks is professor of contemporary archaeology at the University of Oxford and curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum. For over thirty years, Hicks has researched the material and visual culture of the human past, up to and including the modern, colonial, contemporary and digital worlds. Hicks has published nine authored and edited books, including The Brutish Museums—which has been described as ‘the book that changed the conversation about the contemporary museum’—and his latest book Every Monument Will Fall: A Story of Remembering and Forgetting, named one of Art Forum’s Best Books of 2025.
Françoise Vergès is a feminist and decolonial activist, writer, independent curator and public educator. Interested in the racial fabrication of “premature death” and in the multiple practices of resistance, she writes books and articles on the afterlives of slavery and colonization, climate catastrophe and racism, the impossible decolonization of the western museum, decolonial feminism, psychiatry, and the “post-museum.” Her publications include: A Program of Absolute Disorder: Decolonizing the Museum (Pluto, 2024); A Decolonial Feminism (Pluto, 2021); The Wombs of Women: Race, Capital, Feminism (Duke University Press, 2020); Aimé Césaire, Resolutely Black: Conversations with Françoise Vergès (Polity, 2020). She has written documentary films on Maryse Condé (2013) and Aimé Césaire (2011), and was a project advisor for documenta11 (2002) and the Triennale de Paris (2011).