April 1st - June 15th 2024
Amie Soudien (she/her) is an art writer and researcher invested in the intersections of art, history and gender studies concerning histories of enslavement in South Africa in the 17th and 18th centuries. Her work explores how contemporary art, performance and the performing arts commemorate enslavement and enslaved women in the present. She is the editor of Lesser Violence: Volume 1 (2022), published by MaThoko's Books (imprint of GALA Queer Archive), and has contributed to ArtThrob, ArtAFRICA, the Mail & Guardian, and Frieze, among others. She is currently completing her PhD in History of Art at the University of the Witwatersrand.
Thinking with the RCMC research theme ‘care/disrepair’, Amie Soudien will extend upon her PhD research concerning narratives of enslaved women situated in Cape Town to develop a ‘network’ of stories across the VOC empire in regions such as present-day Indonesia, Suriname and Brazil. She will work with the archival resources housed in the Wereldculturen collection, explore how these resources can be activated beyond the museum, and how they might contribute to the remembrance of slavery. An outcome of this research fellowship will be a ‘zine’ or publication, in which Soudien will experiment with artistic and proto-curatorial strategies that engage with representational care, harm and risk.
