Museums Beyond Limits: Imagining Repair Across Cultures, Ecologies and Knowledges

The 58th CIMAM Annual Conference will be held from November 20 to 22 2026 in Harare, hosted by the National Gallery of Zimbabwe under the auspices of the Government of the Republic of Zimbabwe, with the Higherlife Foundation as the Lead Sponsor and Generous Support from Mercedes Vilardell.

Register now until September 30, or when capacity is reached.

In an era marked by planetary precarity, political volatility, and intensifying epistemic contestation, museums are being called to operate beyond inherited limits: of nation, discipline, and authority. This conference proposes repair as a radical, plural, and ongoing practice grounded in relationality, care, and accountability.

As institutions historically shaped by colonial extraction and classificatory regimes, museums now face urgent demands to repair fractured relationships: between communities and institutions, between human and more-than-human worlds, and between dominant and marginalized ways of knowing. 

Situated in Harare, a city whose histories of colonial dispossession and decolonial resurgence offer a powerful lens on cultural resilience, this conference foregrounds contexts where limits have long been contested, negotiated, and reimagined. This edition invites participants to consider what it means for museums to move beyond limits in order to enact repair.

Here, repair is not singular or universal, but situated, dialogic, and often incomplete. How might institutions cultivate ethical forms of co-existence in contexts marked by historical rupture? In what ways can museum practices contribute to ecological and epistemic justice, while remaining accountable to diverse communities and knowledge systems? And how might we imagine repair when the boundaries between cultures, ecologies, and knowledges are porous, unstable, and in flux?

Contributors include Memory Biwa, Esther Chipashu, Neema Githere, Thembinkosi Goniwe, Anawana Haloba, Hou Hanru, Inga Lace, Eva Lin, Meleko Mokgosi, Gabi Ngcobo, and Prof Rukuni, among others.

November 20
Good Museum Practice
"Best practices" has long been defined by Western institutional norms, but in a world of asymmetrical power and cultural plurality, what does “best” mean, and for whom? Might “good practices” – implying effectiveness, adaptability, and context specificity – offer a better ethical framework? This session reconsiders the foundations of museum ethics and governance from multiple perspectives: Indigenous and community-based museologies, African and diasporic models of stewardship, and frameworks that prioritize care, reciprocity, and sustainability over ownership and authority. We will reflect on what it means to build institutions that do not merely preserve culture but genuinely embody cultural care as practice – in conservation, interpretation, and collaboration.

November 21
Tools of Transformation
Museums are not only custodians of the past; they are laboratories for social and ecological transformation. This session foregrounds the tools, technologies, and strategies that enable museums to act as catalysts for change. From digital innovation to participatory co-creation, from new material practices to curatorial activism, we ask: how can museums operate transformation rather than simply represent it? By centering African and Global South methodologies of making, storytelling, and adaptation, this day explores transformation as both process and practice, rooted in the local but resonant across the globe.

November 22
Radical Hospitality
In African philosophical traditions, hospitality is a condition for collective flourishing. The principle of Ubuntu/Unhu, that one becomes human through others, expands land, memory, time, and the more-than-human world. Against ongoing histories of extraction and colonial violence in cultural institutions, radical hospitality positions relationality as both an ethic of being and a strategy of doing. This day asks how museums might practice openness amid exclusion, generosity within scarcity; and what it would mean to inhabit them not as sites of authority, but as shared dwellings for contested histories and possible futures.

The CIMAM 2026 Annual Conference content is conceived by a Steering Committee chaired by Elvira Dyangani Ose.

2026 Travel Grant Funders: Getty Foundation (Lead Sponsor), Instituto Cáder de Arte Centroamericano, Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, Guimarães Rosa Institute, Eloisa Haudenschild, Aimée Labarrere, Simon Mordant and Catriona Mordant, Saastamoinen Foundation, Mercedes Vilardell, and Fernando Zobel de Ayala.