Listen to the curators of Exhibitionary Feels: Re-membering the FUBA Archive read out the Curatorial Statement

Curatorial Statement //

COVID-19 and Online Exhibitions

The Federated Union of Black Artists (FUBA) was established in 1978 and played an important role in training and advancing many of the careers of black artists. The FUBA Archive, compiled by Dr Elza Miles during her tenure as researcher-in-residence at the FUBA Academy (1992 - 1993) is now housed in the library of the Johannesburg Art Gallery. The FUBA Archive is in the initial stages of being digitised by the US Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation. This has opened up the Archive to concepts around accessibility in connection to re-thinking archival practices, what digital technology offers for methods of mapping, tracing history and opening up the Archive for educational purposes.

This curatorial project began with the idea that an exhibition would be arranged in one of the Johannesburg Art Gallery rooms. The genesis of what would have been a physical and visceral exhibition, Exhibitionary Feels: Re-membering the FUBA Archive. The global disruption, or the cause for pause, of COVID-19 has engendered imaginings of new or alternative ways of being. The result of the pandemic is that the art world has been intimately involved in this forced reimagining of the digital space as evidenced through operational decisions made by art institutions across the globe. Additionally, through having limited engagement with the Archive, these ways of being are especially important in filling the gaps between what was accessed and what was not.

The title Exhibitionary Feels: Re-membering the FUBA Archive draws on Simon O’Sullivan's claim, “[y]ou cannot read affects, you can only experience them”, this can be achieved by the intentional consideration that “distinct from the formulations of discourse, and beyond words, affect conveys a locus of sensation, ambiance, and synaesthetic cognition”. In an unprecedented time, with people navigating new feelings and terrains around the global pandemic and the local lockdown, the exhibition title plays on feelings as well as incorporating our curiosity and experimental approach to affect as a central curatorial consideration. For this project, sound, textures and textual provocations become the main modes for thinking about affect, the exhibition and the online space. The significance of contemplations about affect relate to an attempt to translate our own experiences of being in the archive to the online space. It also offers the possibility of inviting immediate sensory responses as guides to connecting to the content present in the FUBA Archive.

Exhibitionary Feels, an online project born out of the global transitional moment brought on by COVID-19, aims to think through broader curatorial considerations regarding knowledge production as well as the participatory and process-focused nature of an evolving and expanding online exhibition. It is put forward as a curatorial experiment in the possibilities of display and engagement with archival content.

Aims and Thematic Pillars

Exhibitionary Feels prompts layered engagements with the contents of the archive, and begins to make socio-political connections between the artists, institutions and other actors present in the documents that constitute it. The online exhibition will use artworks and archival material from the FUBA Archive to investigate themes of access to archives, re-membering, mapping, the aesthetics of xerography, and diversifying authorship.

Long Term

We hope that a digital platform will create a space for continual engagement with the archival material. This could be a more intentional regard for the engagement of the exhibition and the platform as a tool for education. This would provide an opportunity to examine the participatory and process-focused nature of an evolving and expanding online exhibition. The online platform will perform an “imaginary status” of the archive - an assembled product of composition related to the idea of co-ownership of time and illusion of totality.

We also envision the content created by those who engage with the exhibition to become contributions to the archive in some way, invoking references to ideas around the co-development of content, and the forming of a partnership between the public and museums.

Image Reference: Weekly Mail, 29 May 1986.[newspaper article] Available via, Johannesburg Art Gallery, FUBA Archive. Item number: BAD-001-001-006

Meet the Curators

Christa Dee

Matshelane Xhakaza

Rabia Abba Omar

The audio below mimics sounds heard in physical exhibition spaces. It also includes audio recorded outside JAG. Play the audio while going through the web page. These serve as auditory prompts for reading and experiencing this project. These sound pieces will also direct you to the Exhibitionary Feels SoundCloud where all the auditory prompts and interviews are uploaded.