TALK: Institutional Redress

As cultural repair takes on different forms our public institutions become important markers for transformation. But repair has come in many different forms and models over the past years, some projects truly concerned with substantive dismantling like the decolonial projects of #Rhodes Must Fall, but others possibly falling short of their initial redress objective like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. There are reparative projects that may look benign but as addressed in Sara Ahmed’s book Being Included, institutions symbolically champion embodied diversity through the transactional work of marginalized and Black communities but do not seek to change the very scaffolding that made this exclusion palpable and successful from inception.

In this session we explore the role institutions play in actioning redress within structures that must contend with histories of colonial output, archives, and administrations. What role does the museum play in the national redress project and how invested is the public in such programs.

Panelists:

Andrea Lewis is the Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Iziko South African National Gallery (Iziko Museums of South Africa), where she has worked for over 15 years. She holds a BA in the History of Art from University College London and an MA History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art. Her work centres on the care and development of museum collections, using exhibitions as a way to generate new perspectives on South African art across historical and contemporary contexts. She has curated numerous exhibitions spanning different media and periods, including Print Promises (2018), Filling in the Gaps (2019), Matereality (2020) and Motherhood: Paradox and Duality (2025), and is currently curating Matereality V2, opening in August 2026.

Working in the public sector has given Andrea extensive experience in balancing curatorial ambition with the realities of public collections, conservation, procurement, partnerships and audience engagement. Every so often she considers what another career might look like, but before she gets too far, another exhibition or artist project inevitably draws her back in.

Carmen Joubert is a curator at the Norval Foundation in Cape Town, where her practice moves across

artistic programme research and development, exhibition design, and the quietly

transformative work of creating encounters between art and the people who come to meet

it. She holds a Master's degree in Tangible Heritage Conservation from the University of

Pretoria which was awarded on a full Mellon Foundation scholarship; and a Bachelor of Arts

Honours in Communication Design and Art History from Nottingham Trent University, both

First Class Cum Laude. A fluency in the material life of objects and in the layered, often

unexpected stories those objects carry forward allows her to hold preservation and meaning-

making in the same breath.

Before joining Norval, Carmen moved through some of South Africa's most resonant cultural

institutions: the Javett Art Centre at the University of Pretoria, the Brenthurst Library, the

Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre, each one adding a different register to her

understanding of what heritage asks of us. An earlier internship as a creative director at

MullenLowe Global attuned her to the precise and particular ways ideas find their way to

people. Archival, commemorative, commercial, academic: these varied contexts have made

her a curator who listens carefully to the distance between how something is preserved, how

it is interpreted, and who it was always meant to reach.

Having lived across five countries, Carmen developed an early attentiveness to the ways

objects, images, and places become vessels for cultural memory. That experience of moving

between languages, landscapes, and communities may be what drew her, in time, to

curatorial work: a practice grounded in the belief that art can open up new ways of seeing,

hold space for unfamiliar perspectives, and give form to stories that might otherwise slip

away unwitnessed. For Carmen, conservation and curation are not separate pursuits but a

single, enduring impulse: to tend carefully to what we inherit, and to remain curious about

what it might yet mean.