Iziko Museums of South Africa will be hosting a conference titled: Museums, Heritage and Meaning Making from 21-24 October 2025, to reflect on South Africa and southern Africa’s oldest conventional museum.
Iziko Museums hereby invites individuals to register to attend, as it reflects on a very important moment in our history – 200-years of museum making.
The 200th anniversary of IZIKO South African Museum is an opportunity to reflect on the valient efforts of scientists, curators, artists, and archivists to transform institutions from their foundations in the age of Empire to ones that are representative of the ideals of and desires for post-apartheid freedom.
The museum recalls the context of slavery, colonial rule, and apartheid, where cultural and scientific knowledge served to rationalise the rise of Capitalism as a world system. In an era of once defined by growing global interconnectedness, scientific and cultural institutions paved the way for a division of natural philosophy into separate domains of culture and nature on which racial order came to rest. The two-hundredth anniversary of the Iziko South African Museum is a reason to reflect on the place of the museum in the making of modern South Africa and the imbrications of knowledge and power in the crafting of a colonial modernity. It is also an occasion to reflect on how the museum has proceeded to undo the legacies of the wretched scripts of racial formation that served as the foundational fiction of the museum.
To mark the milestone of a two-hundredth anniversary, Iziko South African Museum invites contributions to reflect on the diverse disciplines and research methodologies that address how culture, science, nature, heritage, and memory came to be represented as knowledge in the institutional space of the modern museum.
We also invite presentations on realigning the practices of the museum to highlight our planetary predicament in the present. For example, how might the museum relate to the new technological milieu and climate crisis in our time by facilitating models of education equally guided by our desire for a society free of the racialised burdens of slavery, colonialism, and apartheid. With this conference, we specifically encourage papers that would intensify debates on how memory, arts, culture, heritage and science intersect in productive ways to enlarge understandings of postcolonial and post-apartheid freedom.
Conference Topics
The following are proposed topics. Contributors are also requested not to restrict themselves to the topics listed below but to look deep and beyond them in their analysis of
museums making and the production of knowledge within museums and by museums scientists and researchers.
- Science and Theories of Museum making
- Art, Photography and the promotion of racial science
- Changing theories and their influences in the understanding of science and humanity
- European and Western Influences in the making of museums
- Case Studies on Collecting, Preserving and Conservation, for what?
- Provenance of Collections in Museums’ storerooms and exhibitions, from objects to human remains
- Repatriation and reburial of human remains
Ethics: Governance and Transformation of museums - Autobiographies and biographies of and about memory and representation
- Colonial History and the Structure of Museums
- Internationalisation and legacies of heritage
- The meanings of the language of discovery
- Monuments and memory making
- The intersection of museums and politics
- The relationship between museums, education and tourism
- The nexus between culture, heritage and the economy
Youth-arts, culture, heritage and scientific experiences
The consequences of technology on museums
Confirm your attendance here: https://bit.ly/MuseumsHeritageConference
Please note that seats are limited.
Download ISAM200 Conference INFO
