Associate Members

Duane Jethro

© Tal Adler

CARMAH members’ portraits were captured in March 2017, on the ‘New55 PN’ – a new handmade instant film for large format, 4”x5” cameras. This film was launched through crowdfunding in 2014 as a reinvention of the discontinued, legendary ‘Type 55’ by Polaroid. Since the sixties, Polaroid’s unique ‘Type 55’ starred in many artists’ and professional photographers’ projects. ‘Type 55’ provided both an instant print and a superb negative from which more (and larger) prints could be made. Like so many photographic material in the last 10-15 years, ‘Type 55’ was discontinued in 2009. Tal Adler decided to use the ‘New55 PN’ not only for its beautiful quality but also to reflect, and participate in, the revival of (photographic) heritage.

Street Names, Race, Anthropology and Difference

I am a Junior Research Fellow at the Centre for Curating the Archive, based in the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town. My expertise lies in the analysis of the cultural construction of heritage and contested public cultures. I am trained in the study of religion and also work on intersections between museums, heritage, religion, the secular and the sacred.

My current project is a multiperspectival investigation of the loss and salvage of the University of Cape Town Jagger Library and its collections after a devastating fire in April 2021. I investigate the variable interpolations of loss and the multiple meanings of recovery that arise at the site. I co-curate the Jagger Library Memorial Exhibition ‘Of Smoke & Ash‘ (April – May 2022) with Michaelis Galleries curator Jade Nair, and organise a special symposium ‘After the Fire: loss, archive and African Studies’, with my colleague Aliro Karina, postdoctoral research fellow at the Archive and Public Cultures Research Initiative.

Prior to this, I worked as a researcher at CARMAH. My research into contested street names was situated in the research project, “Making Differences: Transforming Museums and Heritage in the 21st Century“.
I held a Georg Forster Alexander von Humboldt postdoctoral research fellowship between 2017 and 2019 and I was also based at CARMAH.

A graduate of the University of Utrecht, I have published in the International Journal of Heritage Studies, Material Religion, African Diaspora and Tourist Studies. I am an editor of the journal Material Religion and serve on the editorial board of the journal Museums and Social Issues. I am an Associate Research Fellow at the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative at the University of Cape Town. My book Heritage Formation and the Senses in Post-Apartheid South Africa: Aesthetics of Power is a cultural history of heritage and sense making in the post-apartheid dispensation.