In Conversation: Dan Hicks & Françoise Vergés

10.06.2026
19:00
National Library of Kosovo

Writers and curators Dan Hicks and Françoise Vergès have each written boldly and incisively about the museum, the monument, and the cultural institutions of modernity as sites of extractive colonialism and racial capitalism. Meeting together in Prishtina for the first time, they reflect on what lies beyond restitution and what it might truly mean to decolonize the museum.

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).