TALK: Institutional Redress

Panel Discussion | Cultural Repair, Redress and Public Institutions

As cultural repair takes on different forms, public institutions have become important sites for transformation. Yet repair itself has unfolded through many approaches—from the radical decolonial interventions of #RhodesMustFall to projects such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, whose ambitions and outcomes continue to be debated. As Sara Ahmed argues in Being Included, institutions can often celebrate diversity symbolically while leaving the structures that enabled exclusion fundamentally unchanged.

This panel explores the role museums and cultural institutions play in advancing meaningful redress within systems shaped by colonial histories, archives and inherited power structures. How can institutions move beyond symbolic gestures towards genuine transformation? What role do museums play in national processes of repair, and how invested is the public in these efforts?

Panelists

Andrea Lewis is Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Iziko South African National Gallery, where she has worked for more than 15 years. With degrees from University College London and the Courtauld Institute of Art, her curatorial practice focuses on developing museum collections and creating exhibitions that generate new perspectives on South African art across historical and contemporary contexts. Her exhibitions include Print Promises (2018), Filling in the Gaps (2019), Matereality (2020) and Motherhood: Paradox and Duality (2025), with Matereality V2 opening in August 2026.

Working within the public sector has given Andrea extensive experience balancing curatorial ambition with the practical realities of public collections, conservation, partnerships and audience engagement.

Carmen Joubert is a curator at the Norval Foundation, where her practice spans exhibition development, research and creating meaningful encounters between art and its audiences. She holds a Master’s degree in Tangible Heritage Conservation from the University of Pretoria, awarded on a Mellon Foundation scholarship, and a First Class Honours degree in Communication Design and Art History from Nottingham Trent University.

Before joining Norval, Carmen worked with institutions including the Javett Art Centre at the University of Pretoria, the Brenthurst Library and the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre, building a practice centred on heritage, archives and public memory. Having lived across five countries, her work is shaped by a deep interest in how objects, places and images carry cultural memory, and how curation can create space for new ways of seeing, preserving and understanding our shared histories.