Dr Sophia Olivia Sanan will be in conversation with Dr Katrin Antweiler, about the role that Holocaust memorialisation plays in post-apartheid South Africa, and its implications for what conceptions of morality, politics, the individual and society are (implicitly) endorsed and promoted. We will engage with Dr Antweiler’s careful questioning of “how memory politics might uphold racial and colonial power structures, and moreover contribute to the project of colonizing political imagination even where its proclaimed goal is to contribute to a more just world.”

Bearing Witness Series: Archives of Violence within and Beyond the Museum

Titled “Archives of Violence within and Beyond the Museum,“ this instalment, a continuation of Bearing Witness Series, interrogates how memory is constructed, who gets to remember, and what forms of witnessing are possible, especially when conventional modes of memorialisation fall short. Museums have long been sites of authority, tasked with preserving and presenting the past. However, as feminist, indigenous and decolonial scholars have argued, they are also sites of violence, shaped by colonial hierarchies, Western temporalities and rigid categories of identity. How, then, do we attend to what has been excluded, misrepresented or silenced?

Katrin Antweiler

Dr Katrin Antweiler is a researcher and educator from Germany with special interest in politics of memory and history as well as feminist and decolonial critique and theory. Katrin is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bremen and an affiliated researcher at the Wits School of Arts. She finished her PhD in 2022 at the International Graduate Center for the Study of Culture. Katrin’s work focuses on public culture, memory politics and its contradictions, the migration-integration paradigm as well as on global governmentality.

Sophia Sanan

Sophia Olivia Sanan (nee Rosochacki) holds a master’s degree in Sociology (from the Universities of Freiburg, Germany; Jawaharlal Nehru University, India and the University of Cape Town, 2014) and a PhD in Sociology through the University of Cape Town (2024). Her doctoral dissertation investigated politics of identity, loss and heritage through a study of the African art collection at the Iziko South African National Gallery. She has a professional background in African cultural policy development, education and art related research and has taught university students in South Africa, Uganda, the USA, Brazil and India. Since late 2020, she has worked with 12 museums in Africa, South America and South Asia, exploring ideas and practices of museology from Southern perspectives. She publishes on themes related to museology in the Global South; race and arts education; race, inequality and visual culture.

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