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Journal of Visual Culture
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The Apartheid Museum: Performing a Spatial Dialectics

Elizabeth Rankin

Department of Art History, University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, Auckland 1, New Zealand, e.rankin{at}auckland.ac.nz

Leoni Schmidt

School of Art, Otago Polytechnic, Private Bag 1910, Dunedin 9010, New Zealand, leoni{at}tekotago.ac.nz

The Apartheid Museum in South Africa is read through the lens of a condition of `prepossession', where histories of trauma continue to haunt a site while manifesting affectively through spatial ambiguities, which lead to an experience of `empathetic unsettledness'. Paradoxes concerning the provenance of the building and its location are discussed. An analysis follows of changing registers of spatiality through selected key areas of the complex, with reference to Henri Lefebvre's analysis of alternative experiences of space. His notion of `lived' space is applicable to trauma architecture as discussed by concentration camp researcher Wolfgang Sofsky. It is argued that the building critically performs a content which exceeds the limits of representation, thus engendering a sense of embodied unease. Further complications include the appropriation of suffering in dialectical tension with a moving commemoration of apartheid iniquities.

Key Words: apartheid • appropriation • commemoration • criticality • museum • performativity • representation • spatiality

Journal of Visual Culture, Vol. 8, No. 1, 76-102 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/1470412908100901
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