Cape X Utrecht – Hidden Histories of Slavery and its Afterlives, curated by HKU fellow Nancy Jouwe and The Black Archives at AG HKU Utrecht runs from October 7 till November 4, 2023, with the following artists:
Jasper Albinus (1997) is a poet and spoken word artist who performs regularly. He uses his performance and poetry as instruments to make issues around identity, history and politics tangible.
Diana Ferrus (1953) is an internationally renowned South African poet, writer, and activist for marginalised groups. Her poems focus on personal, political, social, and historical themes.Her poem, I’ve come to take you home, a tribute to Sarah Baartman which she wrote while studying in Utrecht, became a catalyst for the return of Baartman’s remains to South Africa after 192 years.
Neo Muyanga (1974) is a composer, musician and installation artist. His work traverses new opera, improv and African idiomatic song. He was born in Soweto and lives and works out of Cape Town. His works include the opera Heart of Redness (2015) and HowAnansi liberated the stories of the world ((2021).
Judith Westerveld (The Hague, 1985) grew up in South Africa and the Netherlands. She studied Fine Art at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and the Master Artistic Research (cum laude) at the University of Amsterdam. In her films, audio-visual installations, photocollages and performance-based work, she researches the relation between the archive, the voice and the narrative, probing who is heard and seen, remembered and historicized in a postcolonial world.
Shishani Vranckx is a vocalist, guitarist and songwriter loved for her soothing and powerful voice. She has received multiple awards and nominations and has toured internationally. Her roots are Namibian and Belgian, but she grew up mainly in the Netherlands. Through her work, these worlds come together. Besides her music career, she holds her Bachelor in Anthropology and Master in Musicology.
Farren van Wyk (1993) is a South-African and Dutch photographer and mentor. She graduated from the University of the Arts Utrecht, 2016 where she did a BA in photography. She has been living in The Netherlands for over 20 years and her dual nationality is the crux of her work.
Carine Zaayman is an artist, curator and scholar committed to critical engagement with colonial archives and collections, specifically those holding strands of Khoekhoe pasts. Her work focuses on the afterlives of slavery and colonialism, particularly in the Cape, by bringing intangible and neglected histories into view. Carine works as a researcher and research coordinator in the Research Centre for Material Culture, Wereldmuseum in the Netherlands.