A seminar by Nessa Liebhammer

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Nessa Liebhammer discusses a collaborative project between the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative at the University of Cape Town (APC) and the Johannesburg Art Gallery, which is the pilot of a larger project Ethnologised Pasts and their Archival Futures, launched by the APC.

Museum and art gallery displays, and colonial and apartheid knowledge activities, are one aspect with which the project is concerned. It aims to draw attention to the archival capacities and challenges of ethnographic material and to enable ongoing recuperation of pasts denied by colonialism and apartheid. The pilot takes as its focus the material culture of Thukela-Mzimkulu region, c 1750 – 1910. It calls into being an expanded archive for that period, and accounts for its historical disavowal.

Nessa Leibhammer is the curator of the Traditional Southern African Art at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, an Honorary Research Fellow of the University of Cape Town and currently a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for African Studies, Cambridge University.