Kieran Burns and Ayoko Mensah on curating ‘Postcolonial?’, confronting the afterlives of empire through historical objects, contemporary art, personal testimony and the politics of institutional memory.
2 September 2026
At the House of European History in Brussels, ‘Postcolonial?’ asks a deliberately unsettled question: what does it mean to speak of colonialism in the past tense when its structures, hierarchies and economies continue to shape the present? Bringing together historical objects and documents, contemporary artworks and eight personal testimonies, the exhibition resists the neat closure of chronology. Instead, it traces the persistence of colonial power across systems of extraction, racial classification, cultural representation and institutional memory, insisting that abolition and political independence marked profound historical ruptures, but not necessarily the end of colonial structures.
Led by Chief Curator and Project Leader Kieran Burns, alongside co-curators Ayoko Mensah, Simina Badica and Joanna Urbanek, the exhibition deliberately places the historical archive in conversation with contemporary artistic practice. Works by artists including Yinka Shonibare, Susan Stockwell, Sammy Baloji and Alexis Peskine complicate the authority of the historical record, connecting colonial extraction to climate change, patriarchy, migration and the continuing inequities of the global economic order. Art operates here not as illustration, but as another form of knowledge, capable of collapsing temporal distance and exposing what conventional histories leave unresolved.
Equally significant are the exhibition’s personal narratives, which interrupt the scale of geopolitical history with experiences carried through families, bodies and memory. Their presence reflects a broader commitment to what the curators describe as multi-perspectivity, a refusal of the singular institutional voice that has historically determined whose histories are preserved and whose are marginalised. The museum itself is not exempt from this scrutiny. From its opening, “Why Space” acknowledges the role museums have played in constructing colonial knowledge, turning the exhibition inward as much as outward.
In conversation with ART AFRICA, Kieran Burns and Ayoko Mensah discuss the challenges of making these continuities visible, the ethics of exhibiting histories of violence, the agency of voices long excluded from dominant narratives, and the responsibility of European institutions to reconsider not only how colonial history is represented, but how its afterlives continue to structure the world we inhabit.
Suzette Bell-Roberts: ‘Postcolonial?’ resists a purely chronological narrative; what does this disruption allow you to reveal about colonialism that a linear history cannot?
Kieran Burns: There is a chronological thread, particularly from 1945 to the present, but we recognised that chronology alone was insufficient. We begin with what we call the structural foundations of European colonialism because it is difficult to understand contemporary issues such as structural and cultural racism without understanding their historical roots.
We then deliberately disrupt that chronology by juxtaposing historical objects and images with contemporary artworks. For example, we might examine the Dutch East India Company of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries alongside a contemporary work by Hew Locke, to highlight the colonial origins of shareholder capitalism. These encounters let us move beyond the idea that colonialism belongs to a completed historical period and instead reveal the connections between those systems and the present.
The exhibition frames colonialism as an ongoing structure rather than a past event. How do you make that continuity felt viscerally, not just intellectually, within the space?
Kieran Burns: One of the principles we establish early in the exhibition is that if a narrative ends with abolition or independence, it tells only half the story. We continually return to the repercussions of those histories.
The 1833 Slavery Abolition Act in Britain, for example, compensated enslavers rather than the enslaved. The British government financed that compensation through bonds whose interest taxpayers paid until 2015. Haiti, meanwhile, was forced to pay France for its independence until 1947. These histories demonstrate that colonialism does not simply stop at a particular historical moment; its economic and social consequences continue to ripple through the present.
Contemporary art and personal testimony are crucial in making those continuities tangible. They connect historical structures to individual lives and to conditions that remain with us today.
There is an inherent contradiction in using European institutional frameworks to critique European colonialism; how did you navigate that tension?
Kieran Burns: We address that from the moment visitors enter. The first area, which we call the Why Space, explains why the House of European History is making this exhibition and asks visitors to consider the museum’s role in constructing colonial knowledge.
We did not want to present the museum as standing outside this history. We also brought different perspectives into the process through our academic advisory group, critical friends, contemporary artists and personal testimonies. The exhibition therefore acknowledges the institution’s position while opening its historical narrative to voices and forms of knowledge often excluded from museums.
The show moves between macro histories and intimate personal stories; where do you see the limits of each, and how do they trouble one another?
Kieran Burns: The personal stories were essential because the larger historical narrative can only take you so far. Each section includes two people speaking about how colonialism affected either their own lives or their family histories.
One story concerns a family history connected to the genocide of the Herero and Nama by German colonial forces in Namibia, as told by Uazuvara Ewald Kapombo Katjivena. Another follows Sabrina Tirvengadum as she explores her Mauritian heritage and her family’s history of indentured labour, which followed slavery and retained many of its continuities. These stories bring the larger structures into human scale.
Ayoko Mensah: Multi-perspectivity was fundamental to our curatorial methodology. The artworks and personal stories articulate different points of view because this history is too complex to be told through a single authoritative narrative.
In staging histories of violence, how did you avoid reproducing the spectacle of suffering while still refusing erasure?
Kieran Burns: We wanted to give the personal stories a very particular place within the exhibition. There is always a danger that testimony becomes something attached to the main historical narrative rather than being given its own weight.
The exhibition therefore moves between more public spaces, which contain the principal historical narrative, and semi-private spaces where visitors can sit, listen, and reflect. Many of these testimonies involve traumatic personal or family histories. We felt visitors needed an environment in which they could encounter those experiences with attention rather than consume them as another object or image.
Contemporary artworks are positioned as acts of “making visible”; what kinds of knowledge do artists produce here that historical archives cannot?
Kieran Burns: Contemporary art allows us to make connections that an historical object alone may not reveal. Yinka Shonibare’s Botanist Kid (Boy), for example, refers to botanical collecting as part of the colonial project. It also points to climate change and the relationship between imperial domination and the domination of the natural world. It links historical extraction to one of colonialism’s most urgent contemporary legacies.
Susan Stockwell’s Colonial Dress, made from maps of the British Empire, connects colonial domination with patriarchy and the domination of the female body. Sammy Baloji creates another temporality by bringing archival images of workers in Katanga’s colonial mines into relation with images of the mines today. Art can collapse those temporal distances, making continuities visible in ways that conventional historical chronology cannot.
The exhibition suggests that independence did not dismantle colonial power; how do the works expose the mechanisms through which that power persists?
Kieran Burns: The exhibition examines the persistence of colonial thinking even as formal empires collapsed. After the Second World War, profound international changes occurred, but colonial attitudes remained embedded in European political and cultural systems.
We look, for example, at the human zoo presented at the Brussels Expo in 1958, colonial nostalgia in culture and literature, and the idea of “Eurafrica”, which linked colonial interests to the early development of European integration. These examples complicate the idea that political independence automatically meant the disappearance of colonial structures.
The contemporary works extend this into the present. Baloji’s work on mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, connects colonial extraction to the continuing global economic order and contemporary extractivism.
Spatially, the exhibition oscillates between openness and enclosure; how does this choreography shape not only how visitors move, but how they reckon with discomfort?
Kieran Burns: We wanted a distinction between the public space of the main historical narrative and more intimate spaces devoted to personal testimony. Visitors can move out of the larger narrative and enter quieter spaces where they can sit, listen and contemplate.
That was particularly important because colonial history contains difficult and traumatic material. The exhibition needs moments when visitors can stop, rather than being continually confronted with information. At the end, another reflective space lets people respond to what they have encountered, read further, and consider some of the questions the exhibition raises.
Including voices shaped by colonial aftermaths raises questions of authorship and authority: who, ultimately, is speaking in this exhibition?
Ayoko Mensah: Multi-perspectivity is central to the curatorial methodology. The contemporary artworks and personal stories prevent the exhibition from speaking through only one voice. They allow different perspectives to coexist and sometimes complicate one another.
It was also important to address whose voices have historically been silenced. We deliberately foreground women’s roles in resistance and independence movements, both within the historical narrative and through the personal testimonies. Women tell six of the eight personal stories. Figures such as Andrée Blouin, Queen Njinga, and Nanny of the Maroons matter because women were active agents in these histories, even though their contributions have often been ignored or forgotten.
Kieran Burns: That extends to the historical material as well. Alongside Toussaint Louverture, for example, we include a nineteenth-century image of Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi, who fought against British rule in 1857. Resistance cannot be narrated as exclusively male, European, or institutional.
The question What now? lingers as an unresolved provocation, for you, where does responsibility lie, within institutions, audiences, or elsewhere?
Kieran Burns: First, we want to establish colonialism’s centrality to European history. That may be obvious to some people, but it is less obvious to others. We then want visitors to understand the resonance of that history and how it continues to impact us today.
We know this is a contested subject, but given its importance to European history, it is more difficult for a museum such as ours to remain silent than to participate in the debate. The House of European History was established as a place in which European history can be discussed and debated.
Responsibility also lies with us as an institution. We want to learn how to listen more, engage more, and bring more personal stories and voices into our permanent exhibition. We cannot know until the exhibition is open whether audiences will understand it exactly as we intended, nor should we. In that sense, the exhibition is a work in progress. What we learn from it should inform how we change our future practices and exhibitions.
The exhibition is on view at the House of European History, Brussels until 14 March 2027.
