Exhibitions of Witness: Locating the Fantastical Imaginaries in Cape Malay History and Identity

Thania Petersen’s 2015 photographic series I AM ROYAL bears witness to the history of Malay people forcibly brought to South Africa from Southeast Asia, which begins from the time of enslavement to the contemporary politics of Islam in South Africa. In this thesis, I reconceptualize exhibitions as spaces of world-making and witness through historical archive research, artist interviews, and a visual analysis of I AM ROYAL. I consider the ways the past is revealed in Petersen’s work and how the images bear witness to difficult history during colonial imperialism and apartheid in the writings of I.D. Du Plessis, the demolition of District Six, and the movement to establish the District Six Museum. I argue for the ways visual languages can resist, reinterpret, and reinscribe meaning through a different set of identifiers located within Thania Petersen’s work and the interventions of queer, feminist, post-colonial and diasporic approaches in the field of museum and exhibition studies.