Stefanie Jason is a curator, writer, and researcher whose work centres on critical memory practices and artistic modes of experimentation and liberation. She is a PhD Candidate in Art History at Rutgers University–New Brunswick. Her dissertation examines site-responsive installations by contemporary African artists, focusing on how these works address archival erasure and extractivism in the afterlives of colonialism. Alongside her doctoral work, Stefanie is conducting research on a collection of images produced in the 1990s by South African photojournalist Ruth Seopedi Motau. Stefanie is a Rutgers Presidential Fellow (2020-2025) and a 2022 ArtTable Fellow with the Amant Foundation. Her writing has appeared in Aperture, ContemporaryAnd, and The Brooklyn Rail.
South Africa’s official record marks 1991 as a significant moment in the nation’s transition from the racially segregated regime of apartheid to a democratic government. Amid political unrest, massacres, and a state of emergency, the year is remembered in mainstream history as the beginning of multiparty negotiations—between the minority National Party, the recently unbanned African…
