Natasha Vally
Next Generation Scholar
South African Social Assistance and the 2012 Privatised National Payment System: An examination of insecurities and technopolitics in social grant administration and payment. She has undergraduate and honours degrees in mathematics and genetics and holds a Masters degree in history. She works, across disciplines, on the technopolitical in post-apartheid South Africa. Her favourite movie is Blade Runner, she awaits the sequel with anticipation.
Zine-making workshop: Something like an archive – Exploring memory through zine-making
‘Something like an archive – Exploring memory through zine-making’ is a one day public workshop at Iyatsiba Lab facilitated by visual artist and educator, Scott Eric Williams.
Exhibition Opening: Tales of History Retold
For this exhibition, eight artists were invited to select artefacts from the document archive of the Association for Visual Arts (AVA), a not-for-profit gallery and collective in Cape Town, as source material for an artistic response.
Artists’s Forum with Kemang Wa Lehulere
The Artists Forum, convened at the Centre for Humanities Research, emerges out a longstanding conversation between artists and academics working in and through the CHR. The Forum’s objective has been to connect scholarly exploration with the CHR’s Artist in Residency programme, and to bring artists and humanistic study into a more intimate adjacency.
The Polyrhythmic Ensemble
The Polyrhythmic Ensemble was formed in 2023 with the aim of creating new works based around research into contrapuntal and polyrhythmic African music.
Culture and Technics Workshop: 10-12 November
The UK-SA Chair in Digital Humanities, held by Prof. Premesh Lalu, is welcoming international scholars to Cape Town in November to attend a three-day roundtable at Iyatsiba Lab in Woodstock.
Fellowship Announcement: Siyanda Kobokana
We are delighted to announce that SA/UK Digital Humanities PhD fellow, Siyanda Kobokana, has been selected for the inaugural Paris Doctoral Research Residency at IFAS–Fondation Fiminco–ArTeC.
An Archive and Forms of Sight: Gestures of Madness
My history of madness in the Belgian Congo will rely on tracking transactional, micro, and urgent documents as gestures. These promise to open “spheres of ethos,” with human riddles, forms of upheaval, and violence (Agamben 1992).
In Black Women’s Hands: A History of Gestures in Photography and Textile
Contemporary Black female artists have reclaimed the everyday labor and domestic motions women have historically performed, as artistic gestures in their own right. For example, the ceramic and bronze sculptures of the African-American artist Simone Leigh have referenced vernacular processes like washing chores and needlework.
Together Apart The Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement
In April 1964, the Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement (IAAM) was launched in Dublin by Kader Asmal, a South-African professor of law in Trinity College. Lobbying for improved human rights and liberation in South Africa, the Movement raised awareness of the racism experienced by communities and campaigned for the release of political prisoners.