Browsing by Author "Grunebaum, Heidi"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    Affect and art: encounters with objects of power in South African museum and archival collections
    (Universty of the Western Cape, 2024) Stone, Kristy; Grunebaum, Heidi
    This doctoral thesis investigates the ontological foundations of museum praxis by examining four objects of power located in Western Cape Museum archives in South Africa. These objects – a Tsimshian soul catcher, a bushman hunting bag, Entada rheedii sea beans and an azimat (Islamic written amulet) – all classified under the label of "charms," an invented category that groups everything that is not “rational”, Western and Christian together. In museums “charms” are continuously derided as the antithesis of modernism and the embodiment of paganism, animism or as traditional and taken as symbols of “pre-contact societies”. The term "charm" also encompasses objects connected to diverse healing paradigms, intimately tied to ideas of sickness, the body and spirituality. Consequently, these artefacts hold profound personal and social significance to the communities from whence they originated, prompting a deep enquiry about the histories of oppression that resulted in their collection, and whether they should continue to remain in museums and archives. These objects, in other words, challenge traditional museum categories and narratives, asking uncomfortable questions of the institutions that store them and those who study them.
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    Athlone in mind
    (University of the Western Cape, 2019) Grunebaum, Heidi; Campbell, Kurt; Lalu, Premesh
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    Debates on memory politics and counter-memory practices in South Africa in the 1990s
    (UNISA Press, 2018) Grunebaum, Heidi
    Memory politics are often regarded as the �soft� issues contested in the aftermath of political and social upheaval. Yet critical public debates on memory, justice, impunity and reconciliation in South Africa prompted by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) process suggest otherwise. I offer a partial review of some of the key themes and critical debates on justice, reconciliation and memory in the 1990s, followed by a discussion of the spatial practices of the Direct Action Centre for Peace and Memory (DACPM) whose multilayered social pedagogy and activist repertoire of the transitional period challenged the terms of the political transition and the scope of the TRC. The debates on the TRC and the practices of the DACPM constitute but a glimpse into the significance of memory-work for now forgotten terrains of civil activist intervention, contestation and practice.
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    Portrait of a mobile political subject: The figure of the Afghan Mujahedeen in South Africa in the 1980s.
    (University of Western Cape, 2019) Moosa, Medina; Grunebaum, Heidi; Israel, Paolo
    This mini-thesis engages with the period of the Cold War between 1979 and 1989 to examine the shifts and contradictions that emerged around the figure of the �terrorist� and the �freedom fighter with a focus on the Afghan Mujahedeen. From 1979 to 1989, the Soviet Union invaded and occupied Afghanistan. This period was witness to the formation of the Mujahedeen who fought against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and also against the political ideologies of communism. In so doing, the Mujahedeen became political allies for the South African apartheid government as well as others fighting against the communist agenda
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    Uncontained and the Constraints of Historicism as Method: A reply to Mario Pissarra
    (Africa South Art Initiative (ASAI), 2013) Grunebaum, Heidi
    Mario Pissarra�s rigorous and considered critical review of Uncontained: Opening the Community Arts Project archive (2012) marks a significant contribution to starting a discussion that the book and exhibition aimed to provoke. That an interlocutor of his authority has undertaken such an attentive and thoughtful critique does the publication a great service and opens up pathways for further conversation and work on the Community Arts Project (CAP) art collection at the University of the Western Cape (UWC). I would like to reciprocate in a similar vein and take up Third Text Africa�s invitation to respond to Pissarra�s review by thinking about the merits and limits of his critique.