Dr O'Connell will discuss her two most recent projects which thinks through questions of the archive, the photographic image and re-presentation.

‘Archive, Image and Freedom:  The Spring Queen and Curate Africa Projects’

Dr Siona O’Connell is a Senior Curator at the Centre for Curating the Archive at UCT. She has been a lecturer at the Centre for African Studies and a curator of the Centre for African Studies Gallery. She is a Trilateral Reconnections Project Fellow and a BIARI (Brown International 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. Her projects include working with clothing and textile workers in South Africa as well as an exhibition on the photographs of Edward C Curtis and Alfred Duggan-Cronin. O’Connell has recently returned from a guest-lectureship at RISD, RI, US.

Dr O’Connell will discuss her two most recent projects which thinks through questions of the archive, the photographic image and re-presentation.