2020 Students

Jade Nair was born in Cape Town in 1991. She has a background in Art History and English Literature and has held a position at the Centre for Curating the Archive since 2013. Her work has focussed on projects dealing with the afterlives of apartheid across a range of formats including photographic exhibitions, documentary filmmaking and digital archives.

In her undertaking of the curatorship course, Jade has formalized and refined the curatorial skills she has acquired through her work. Her research is currently focussed on a South African edition of Vogue magazine. Through a hauntological approach, her project seeks to decolonize the publication by inserting the parallel narratives that were silenced by apartheid and forgotten by time.

Sibulele Mabe completed her Bachelor of Arts at the University of Cape Town in 2019, majoring in Visual Art History and Media and Writing. She has acquired nearly four years working in the wider field of fine arts and has served as an intern in established cultural institutions.

Her scholarly interests include critical race theory, the sociology of surveillance, decoloniality and the archive. Her research project pays attention to the politics of access and black subjectivity within the heritage museum field. She is also particularly interested in the decolonization of conservation and preservation practices. Passionate about human rights, social justice and equality, she wants to take an active role in democratizing history for future generations.

Lucie Panis-Jones was born in 1993 in Harare, Zimbabwe to French-Belgian and American parents. 

She grew up in Harare, then in Cleveland, Ohio (United States) and in Limoges, France. Her love of colours, textures and patterns led her to study textile design in Roubaix, France, and then to specialise in weaving in Brussels, Belgium, where she obtained a Bachelor’s in Textile Design at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. She worked as a textile designer at a weaving studio in Paris for almost two years before resuming her education to study Curatorship. 

Growing up with different cultures and living in different environments has instilled her with a curiosity about other people, places, expressions. For Lucie, Curatorship is an opportunity to tie together this curiosity with her passion for art, colour, language, and creating common ground - this is what makes her feel at home in the world. 

Thabang Kanyane is an artist-curator who works in mediums such as painting, sound and film. He is a 2019 Bachelor of Technology in Fine Art cum laude graduate at Tshwane University of Technology. His body of work for his graduation exhibition consisted of a series of paintings which intersected with outsider art and free jazz. Thabang’s key interests are experimental artistic modes  - and he explores these in  the fields of fine arts, music and film.

In his Honours research he engages with alternative exhibition spaces by observing the exhibition space to be both an object and site which has the capacity to transform viewer perceptions and experiences. He investigates some possibilities which alternative exhibition spaces can offer to artists and curators which might not be accommodated by the white cube.   

Kay-Leigh Fisher is an aspiring curator and publisher, born in 1998 in Johannesburg, South Africa. She is a fine art graduate from the Wits School of Arts and decided to pursue the narrative power of curation to learn how she could help tell the important stories of others.

Kay-Leigh’s primary research has been focused on becoming narratives in regard to the development of hegemonic companion relationships with mediating objects that reinforce idealisations around identity.  Her research has focused on objects that promise various transformations, particularly towards a projection of femininity within the complexity of feminized labour. She is interested in the ambiguity of being, through the practice of unlearning which occurs in counter-cultural spaces that promote care at embodied levels.

She is also the co-founder of a digital publishing initiative called ACT Zines. The collective produces zine publications as alternative exhibitions that are built on a framework of collaboration through the exploration of a range of performativity. 

Xola Mlwandle was born in the Eastern Cape and obtained a BA, majoring in Anthropology and History, from University of Fort Hare. She is interested in the experiences and memories of individuals, especially those excluded by South African history and the public domain - and formulates new ways to manifest these accounts through story-telling and various forms of representation.

Her research for the Honours in Curatorship programme focuses on the idea of the traditional and symbolic act of wearing headdresses amongst Xhosa women and women who identify as African. She investigates how it has been politicized and misinterpreted through tracing histories and looking into archives and in so doing, unpacks ideas on the cultural aspects of the headdress and its undocumented histories.