CIMAM’s 58th Annual Conference convenes on the African continent for the first time, bringing the international museum community to Harare for a programme shaped by questions of repair, responsibility, knowledge and the future of the museum.
22 september 2026
For the first time in its history, the CIMAM (International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art) Annual Conference will take place on the African continent. From 20–22 November 2026, museum directors, curators, researchers and cultural practitioners from across the world will gather in Harare, Zimbabwe, for the 58th edition of the conference, hosted by the National Gallery of Zimbabwe.
Significantly, the move to Africa is accompanied by African curatorial and institutional leadership in shaping the conference itself. Elvira Dyangani Ose chairs the 2026 Content Steering Committee, which includes Raphael Chikukwa, Executive Director of the National Gallery of Zimbabwe and CIMAM Board member. Dyangani Ose’s trajectory places her at the intersection of curatorial practice and institutional leadership, with a significant relationship to contemporary African and diasporic art. She is Artistic Director of the second Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial (2026–27) and, from 1 October 2026, will become Artistic Director of Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town, where she will oversee the museum’s curatorial vision as it approaches its second decade. Her curatorial research has consistently engaged non-Western narratives and epistemologies, collective histories and contemporary African artistic production. Chikukwa, meanwhile, leads the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, the institution hosting this first African edition.
This matters because CIMAM is not simply relocating an established international conversation to an African city. The intellectual framework of the Harare conference has been developed by a Content Steering Committee that brings African and diasporic curatorial perspectives into dialogue with museum professionals working across Asia, Europe, the Americas and the Middle East. Alongside Dyangani Ose and Chikukwa are Renée Akitelek Mboya, Fadzai Muchemwa, Paula Nascimento, Smooth Nzewi, Marie Hélène Pereira, Suzana Sousa, Sunjung Kim, Stephanie Rosenthal and Jochen Volz.
The distinction is important. Africa is not simply the location or subject of the conference; perspectives from the continent shape the structure through which its questions have been formulated.
Under the overarching theme Museums Beyond Limits: Imagining Repair Across Cultures, Ecologies and Knowledges, CIMAM 2026 considers what museums might become if some of their inherited boundaries – of nation, discipline and authority – are reconsidered. At its centre is the idea of repair, understood not as a singular or completed act, but as an ongoing practice grounded in relationships, care and accountability.
These questions carry particular weight in Harare, Zimbabwe. Museums internationally are confronting histories of colonial collecting and classification, restitution and repatriation, cultural ownership, institutional authority and the systems of knowledge through which histories and objects have been interpreted. The conference itself acknowledges museums as institutions historically shaped by colonial extraction and classificatory regimes, while asking how relationships between communities and institutions, and between dominant and marginalised ways of knowing, might be reconsidered.
Harare is consequently more than a backdrop. Its histories of colonial dispossession and decolonial resurgence provide a context through which cultural resilience, institutional responsibility and repair can be examined. The location raises a larger question for the international museum community: what changes when conversations about the future of museums are not only concerned with Africa, but take place within Africa?
Across three days, the programme develops these questions through three interconnected propositions.
The first, Good Museum Practice, begins by questioning who has historically been able to determine institutional “best practice”. Rather than assuming that established Western institutional norms can function universally, the programme turns towards Indigenous and community-based museologies, African and diasporic models of stewardship, and frameworks that prioritise care, reciprocity and sustainability. Questions of museum policy, funding and transparency sit alongside one of the most consequential debates facing museums today: repatriation, restitution and the rebuilding of trust.
Gabi Ngcobo, Director of Kunstinstituut Melly in Rotterdam, delivers the opening keynote, while contemporary artist and Yale Associate Professor Meleko Mokgosi serves as the day’s Chronist.
Day Two, Tools of Transformation, moves from institutional structures towards the means through which museums might participate in social and ecological change. The programme considers museums not simply as custodians of the past but as laboratories where different forms of knowledge, participation, and cultural production can be tested.
The questions are distinctly contemporary: whose data shapes cultural memory; how museums should approach machine knowledge; what meaningful relationships between museums and communities might look like; and what languages institutions will need to engage future audiences. Keynote speaker David Teh is joined across the programme by Neema Githere, Inga Lāce and Hamza Walker. Esther Chipashu, Curator of Ethnography at the National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe in Harare, serves as the day’s Chronist.
The final day, Radical Hospitality, shifts the discussion towards access, belonging and care. Drawing on the African philosophical principle of Ubuntu/Unhu – an understanding of human existence through relationship with others – the programme asks what it would mean for museums to operate less as sites of authority and more as shared spaces that can hold contested histories and possible futures.
Art historian, curator and writer Thembinkosi Goniwe delivers the keynote, with Mandivamba Rukuni, Anawana Haloba and Eva Lin addressing questions of radical welcome, emotional infrastructure and relationships with the more-than-human world. Historian and artist Memory Biwa, of Bravebird Research and Pungwe Listening, serves as the final day’s Chronist.
Another notable element of the programme is the introduction of the Chronist role. Inspired by the Latin American and Iberian tradition of the crónica, the role moves beyond conventional conference reporting. Each Chronist will offer an interpretive reading of the ideas and debates emerging through keynote addresses, breakout sessions and conversations, while attending to the informal exchanges and unexpected encounters that can be as consequential as the formal programme.
An important distinction exists between the increasing international visibility of African art and the movement of international cultural institutions and their professional networks towards the continent itself. African artists, curators and thinkers have long participated in museums, biennales and cultural forums around the world. Convening CIMAM in Harare changes that direction of travel, bringing an international museum community into direct conversation with an African city, its institutions and some of the intellectual frameworks emerging from the continent.
It also arrives at a moment when the geography of institutional influence is becoming more complex. Dyangani Ose’s position is emblematic of this movement: simultaneously shaping the Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial, preparing to assume artistic leadership of Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town, and chairing the committee developing the intellectual framework for CIMAM’s first Annual Conference in Africa.
The significance of CIMAM 2026 therefore lies not simply in being the first edition held on the continent. It lies in the possibility created by location, leadership and exchange. Harare, Zimbabwe, is not merely hosting an international conversation about the future of museums. For three days in November, it becomes one of the places from which that future is being considered.
Register for the conference: https://www.cimam.org/cimam-annual-conference/annual-conference-2026-harare/registrations-to-cimam-2026/.
CIMAM 2026 Annual Conference
Museums Beyond Limits: Imagining Repair Across Cultures, Ecologies and Knowledges
20–22 November 2026, National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Harare, Zimbabwe.
