amie lindiwe hanan soudien

Special Collection

Final exhibition: Michaelis School of Fine Art, UCT

(2013)

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The Special Collection stems from a “quest” for answers
and an attempt to piece together my family’s story. It comes from a place of forgetting, of trying to forget and of not knowing. The project emerges periodically as my research unfolds and invariably meets dead ends. During colonial and apartheid South Africa, control over people of colour was maintained through bureaucratic processes and government documents were a pivotal means to validate one’s presence in a city or institution. This project is not an attempt at such a “validation” through the archive. The Special Collection aims to tell the previously untold personal historical narrative and attempts to convey the disjuncture between documented history and the lived experiences of real people.