Program

Every day – All day 

PARTICIPATORY PAVILLION

  • Kristīne Milere, Latvian National Museum of Art, and Alastair Willis, Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales

The Participatory Pavilion is a space where participants are invited to explore and contribute to the Decolonizing Practices digital platform. This is a project created by museum professionals and curators working across Zimbabwe, South Africa, Latvia, Wales, Germany, and beyond. Through mutual sharing of practices—which participants can record using the writing and drawing materials provided in the pavilion during coffee breaks and other pauses—the platform gathers concrete examples, ideas, and approaches to decolonizing museum practice. 

 

Thursday 5th November 2026

9.30 | COFFEE AND REGISTRATION  

10:00–11.15 | WELCOME, INTRODUCTION & KEYNOTE LECTURE I.

  • Anna Majola and Matthew Rampley (Masaryk University, Brno) 

  • Keynote Lecture I.: Njabulo Chipangura (Maynooth University): Carrying Practices and Pragmatic Decolonial Approaches: African Collections in European Museums

11.15–11.30 | COFFEE 

11.30 – 13.00 |   PANEL 1: Collectors (Chair: Jana Švantnerová)  

  • Margaret Tali (Tallinn University): The Solomentsev Brothers Collection in the Estonian National Museum 

  • Daniela Šnapková (Charles University, Prague): Václav Šolc in Chilean Indigenous Communities: Collection, Representation and Contemporary Responses 

  • Lenka Piper (Independent researcher): Exhibiting Australian Aboriginal Art in Czechoslovakia: The Case of Karel Kupka 

13.00–13.45 | LUNCH

13.45 – 15.15 | CURATORIAL GUIDED TOUR: “Vojta Náprstek Reloaded” + discussion with curators 

15.15 – 15:30 | TEA 

15.30 – 17.00 | PANEL 2: Curators (Chair: Michaela Pejčochová) 

  • Anna Remešová (Academy of Fine Arts in Prague): Institutional Forgetting: The Case of the Náprstek Museum of Asian, African, and American Cultures 

  • Marko Stamenkoviq (Wenzhou-Kean University, China): From Ōtautahi to Sarajevo: Europe, Coloniality, and the Unmaking of Epistemic Racism in Curatorial Humanities 

  • Magdalena Kuninska (Jagiellonian University, Kraków): From the romanticised King of Madagascar to ‘The Jews of Madagascar’: Madagascar’s presence in Polish (visual) culture 

18.00 – 20.10 | Cinema (Ponrepo – National Film Archive, Bartolomějská 11) 

  • Screening of archival movies on the Czech global travelers Zikmund and Hanzelka  

Friday 6th November 2026  

9:00–9:30 | MORNING COFEE AND TEE 

9.30 – 11.00 | PANEL 3: Self-representation (Chair: Patrick Laviolette) 

  • Gabriela Switek (University of Warsaw): Fromthe National Galleries to Travelling Exhibitions:Modern Art from Asia in Socialist Warsaw 

  • Adéla Tůmová (Náprstek Museum, Prague): From North Korea with Love Dary KLDR a jejich role v muzejní reprezentaci v Československu 

  • Joanna Wasilewska (Polish Institute of World Art Studies, Warsaw): The lotus flower and the rifle. Exhibitions of Vietnamese art in late communist Poland and their reception 

11.00 – 11.15 | COFFEE BREAK

11.30 – 13.00 | PANEL 4: Ethical issues (Chair: Matthew Rampley) 

  • Gabriela Saenger Silva (Liverpool John Moores University): Naming in the Global: Guarani and the Baťa Network as meeting points of expansion 

  • Pavla Machalíková (Institute of Art History, Czech Academy of Sciences): Bison Hides and Trophy Installations 

  • Tomáš Winter (Institute of Art History, Czech Academy of Sciences): “He Refused to Yield to Pressure…” Emil Holub’s Collecting and Exhibiting of San Rock Engravings: An Act of Rescue or Violence? 

13.00 – 14.00 | LUNCH 

14:00-15:30 | PANEL 5: Socialist version of the Anti-Colonialism (Chair: Anna Majola) 

  • Mariia Guleva (Charles University, Prague): Chinese exotic self: 1955 exhibition of Chinese applied arts in Prague and Zhong Ling’s promotional drawing 

  • Rado Ištok (National Gallery Prague / Charles University): Oswaldo Guayasamín in Prague 

  • Barbora Buzzasyová (Institute of History of the Slovak Academy of Sciences): Staging Solidarity: African Art Exhibitions and Limits of Anti-Colonialism in State-Socialist Czechoslovakia (1960s – 1980s) 

15:30 – 15:45 | COFFEE BREAK

15:45 – 17:00 | KEYNOTE LECTURE II

  • Claudia Augusta (Weltmuseum, Vienna, Austria): Way of No Return or Road to Nowhere? Decolonising Ethnographic and World Culture Museums 

18.00 – 19.00 | CINEMA (Ponrepo – National Film Archive, Bartolomějská 11, Praha)

  • Screening of Jan Rousek films reflecting on the colonial history of Czechoslovakia 

From 19:30 | After conference meeting with dinner (voluntary) 

Saturday 7th November 2026  

09.30 – 11.00 | PANEL 6: Reasons for Collecting and Exhibiting 1 (Chair: Ondřej Crhák) 

  • Zsuzsanna Csordás (Persica Centropa Project, University of Vienna): Who are we? A theory behind collecting Asian artifacts in Hungary (1867–1939) 

  • Michaela Pejčochová (Oriental Institute, Czech Academy of Sciences): Welcoming friends from afar: Approaches to collecting and exhibiting East Asian art in Czechoslovak private and public collections, 1920s – 1950s 

  • Olga Kozhura (Tel Aviv University): Fighting China on Display: Art, Politics, and Sino-Soviet Cultural Diplomacy at the "Art of China" Exhibition, 1940–1941 

11.00 – 11.15 | COFFEE 

11.15 – 12.45 | PANEL 7: Reasons for Collecting and Exhibiting 2 (Chair: Tomáš Winter) 

  • Helena Heroldová (Náprstek Museum, Prague): Výstavy o Číně po druhé světové válce a Náprstkovo muzeum 

  • Iván Szantó (Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest): Islamic Art in Hungarian Cultural Policies of the 1950s 

  • Tamar Barbakadze (Independent researcher and writer, Georgia): Between Solidarity and Spectacle: Global Art in Late Soviet and Post-Soviet Exhibition Practices

  • Lucie Dvořáková, Daria Kruchenko, Eva Pavla Ngamokoba and Jana Švantnerová: Curating New Narratives:  The case of Non-European collections from the travels of Josef II Colloredo-Mannsfeld at Opočno State Castle 

 12.45 – 13.00 | CLOSING REMARKS