Thania Petersen, Remnants 5, 2017, Pigmented inkjet print on Baryta paper
46 x 70 cm
Edition of 50
Printed by ORMS, Cape Town
Thania Petersen was born in 1980 in Cape Town, South Africa, where she currently lives and works. She is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice focuses on photographic self-portraiture, multi-sensory installation and performance. Her work often explores specific cultural, religious, and linguistic identities through the performing of historical figures or archetypes.
Thania Petersen interrogates the reductive nature of the labels of ‘Coloured’ and ‘Cape Malay’ which the Apartheid government placed upon diverse communities. Petersen works in a variety of mediums, including photography, video, embroidery, and immersive installations. The title of the Remnants series refers to the remnants of her ancestral history as a direct descendant of Tuan Guru (Imam Abdullah ibn Qadhi Abd al-Salam), an Indonesian prince who was politcally exiled by the Dutch in South Africa. After twelve years of imprisonment on Robben Island, he lived in Cape Town and spearheaded the establishment of Islam in the Cape by founding a madrasah - a Muslim school. Confronting the traumatic history of her family history, Petersen travelled to Surat in India, formerly a directorate of the Dutch East India Company. There, she visited the mausoleums of the men who exiled her ancestors to South Africa. In Remnant 5, we see her moving within this imposing Colonial space, wearing a red dress which evokes the violence perpetrated against her people, as well as her own regal power.
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