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Résumé

This article examines Grada Kilomba’s The Boat (2021) and Hew Locke’s What Have We Here? (2024), articulating how these works engage cultural memory, decolonial praxis, and postcolonial activism within decolonial museum contexts. Grounded in Françoise Vergès’s theory of decolonizing the museum, this analysis explores how both artists activate counter-memory, challenge colonial narratives, and create postcolonial sites of resistance, reconfiguring aesthetic experience into emancipatory practice. Bearing in mind Françoise Vergès’ ideas on decolonising the museum by disordering, decentering and dispersing it, this article proposes a dialogic reading of two contemporary afro-descendant artists whose artistic creations put into question official narratives and how they perpetuate multiple forms of silence and epistemic violence. The works of Grada Kilomba and Hew Locke to be analysed here interrogate the power relations that are established when representing cultures and peoples. From what is said to what has been silenced, these works are a necessary reminder that there are a multitude of voices that must be included in national conversations. Therefore, these works focus on how to reckon with colonial / imperial pasts. Both artists provocatively examine the stories that nations tell themselves about their own histories both politically and symbolically. Thus, by establishing a dialogue between Grada Kilomba and Hew Locke, it is my goal to examine the way these two contemporary artists contribute to the decolonisation of the museum through the questioning of official narratives and by performatively re-writing them in a space that has been previously configured to validate certain ideologies.