Siona O’Connell

Dr Siona O’Connell is a research affiliate for Centre for Curating the Archive. She is a Trilateral Reconnections Project Fellow and a BIARI (Brown Internal Advanced Research Institute) alumnus.

Her work around archives and curation seeks to shift frames from aesthetics to restorative justice to open up questions around representation, freedom, trauma and memory in the aftermath of oppression. She is committed to research that engages new constituencies. Her projects include working with clothing and textile workers in South Africa, forced removals, pageants of the Western Cape and the apartheid imagery of Adile Bradlow, Benny Gool and Zubeida Vallie.

She has produced and directed five documentaries using the exhibition and documentary film as the entry point into conversations on ways of life after apartheid.

She now lectures at the University of Pretoria but still remains in contact with the CCA . We hope to see collaborations between Dr O’Connell and the centre in the near future.

Projects & Curations under the CCA:

• Shared Legacies – Siona O’Connell and Dale Washkansky
• Vice Chancellors’ Conversation – Siona O’Connell
• Extraordinary Lives: Portraits from a Divided Land. Photographs by Sophia Klaase
• Martyrs, Saints and Sell-outs
• Spring Queen
• Movie Snaps
• Zubeida Vallie archive
• The Wynberg 7: An Intolerable Amnesia
• An Impossible Return
• Coloured
• The Mirror in the Ground
• Promises and Lies: The ANC in Exile
• A Stygian Darkness: Destruction and Detritus in the South African Mining Industry
• Martyrs, Saints and Sell-outs at the Market Photo Workshop