This week we speak with Heba Abd el Gawad and Qanita Lilla, two museum curators who are decentering the colonial gaze of museums to forefront the meanings of museum collections for the communities to whom they belong. We discuss the colonial legacy of museums, the increasing censorship of museum spaces by settler colonial forces seeking to control the narrative, and what it means for museums to not serve as owners of cultural belongings, but to step aside and act as a facilitator, where indigenous communities might use the space of the museum to express themselves. 

Heba Abd el Gawad is an Indigenous Egyptian heritage and museum activist and researcher. She is Senior Curator of Anthropology at the Horniman Museum and Gardens, facilitating Indigenous community research, care, and access to cultural belongings from North Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. She has co-developed, with UCL’s Prof. Alice Stevenson, the AHRC funded project: “Egypt’s Dispersed Heritage: Views from Egypt,” aiming at amplifying the voice, visibility and validity of modern Egyptian communities in UK museums. She focuses on developing meaningful and equitable community partnerships as a means of building relevant, relatable, and responsive social and economic futures for colonially extracted and exploited cultural belongings in UK museums. 

Qanita Lilla is Curator of Canadian and African Art at Agnes Etherington Art Center, Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. She has a PhD in Visual Arts from Stellenbosch University, South Africa (2018). Her curatorial and scholarly practice focuses on issues of social justice and activates narratives through scholarly research, artists’ residencies, art commissions, public programming, exhibitions and publications. She has published in peer-reviewed journals, popular publications like The Conversation, contributed book chapters to anthologies and is the host of the podcast With Opened Mouths, where she interviews BIPOC artists, poets, musicians and curators about their creative practice.

Additional Resources:
Sarr-Savor Report from 2018: The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage: Toward a New Relational Ethics

Heba’s exhibit at the Horniman Museum: “All Eyes on Her!”

Canadian Museum of Human Rights exhibit: Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present.

Open letter from the Indigenous Curatorial Collective regarding the departure of Wanda Nanibush

The Everyday Orientalism Podcast explores how Orientalism continues to have deep ramifications in our everyday lives, for how we think about settler-colonialism, liberation, and how empire and capitalism continue to exploit and dehumanize the majority of us. Defined by Palestinian American literary scholar Edward Said, Orientalism is “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.” Our podcast celebrates the 10th anniversary of the platform Everyday Orientalism.

Host: Girish Daswani
Editor and producer: Taylor Stark
Research assistant: Sophie Plotkin
Intro music: Madame Salame – Decaf