Rabia Abba Omar is a researcher and curator working towards a MA in Visual Studies from Stellenbosch University’s Visual Arts Department. She is a joint MA fellow at AVReQ and Exeter University’s Imagining Futures of Un/Archived Pasts. She likes to think with/of the ocean, memory, archives, object histories and current expressions of past violences. She holds a MA in Heritage Studies from the University of the Witwatersrand, where she was part of the Oceanic Humanities of the Global South. She is also an alumni of the UnSchool of Disruptive Design’s Emerging Leaders Fellowship and the Accountability Lab’s Non-Profit Management Fellowship.

Current Research

This thesis builds on the growing literature that argues that bodies can be read and understood as archives. In this project, I explore three body-archives (case studies) from three non-traditional archives that document violence against women in South Africa, from past to present. Within these non-traditional archives, I explore three artistic works, which I argue challenge the archival silences that exist within the traditional archive through challenging the inherent systems of power that give the traditional archive its authority. I propose that the role of these artworks is to engage (and go beyond) the traditional archive and its limits as a form of decolonial archival praxis. Specifically, I examine how the three artworks can be used to counter the silences left within the traditional archive by creating space for connection and interaction between the three women, the artists, and the audiences.

Supervisors: Dr. Kathryn Smith, Professor Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela

Advisor: Professor Elena Isayev

Email: rabia@sun.ac.za | Tel: +27 (21) 808 4047