Introduction of new student and postdoc

In 2022, the APC welcomed Masters student Sihle Motsa and Postdoctoral fellow Nina Liebenberg.

Master’s student and History Access Scholar, Sihle Motsa, is a writer and art practitioner interested in curatorial and archival research methodologies. Her approach is interdisciplinary, and she is interested in linguistics, visual cultures, gender and Black modalities of being that complicate futurity. Her research traces the discursive boundaries of the digital archive, exploring how, in that setting, myth is coded and how orality and meaning making. She is interested in the temporal dimensions of the archive and what knowledges may emerge from reading the future as an historical period. She has worked as a sessional lecturer and has authored multiple articles for art publications. These include a chapter for the Art South Africa Initiative and a catalogue essay for the “When Rain Clouds Gather” exhibition curated by Nontobeko Ntombela and Portia Malatjie.

Nina Liebenberg was awarded a BAFA by the University of Stellenbosch and an MFA by the University of Cape Town. She has been a member of the Centre for Curating the Archive (CCA) at the Michaelis School of Fine Art (UCT) since 2013. Here, she has taught on various modules for the Honours in Curatorship programme and facilitated annual interdisciplinary workshops that use curation as methodology to explore overlaps and connections between diverse university departments. Her PhD thesis, completed in 2021, took the form of an object study that exposed the limitations of insider knowledge and systems of categorisation within the academic departments of the University of Cape Town. It demonstrated the explanatory, interdisciplinary potential of curatorship and artmaking. Her 2022 post-doc, jointly in the APC and CCA, involves multiple digital archival curations for the APC’s re-source project and the CCA’s digital Bleek and Lloyd project.