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The Medicine Chest

Isigubu through Gqom

Item

Title

Isigubu through Gqom

Is Part Of

SA College of Music See all items with this value
African Studies See all items with this value
Centre for Curating the Archive See all items with this value
History See all items with this value
Fine Art See all items with this value

Description

"In 2018, the Zulu drum alleged to have been played during the 1906 Bambatha rebellion against British rule and unfair taxation in the colony of Natal (discussed by Nixon) became the focus of Amogelang Maledu’s Honours research project. In ‘Isigubu through gqom: The sound of defiance and Black joy’, Maledu (who has an undergraduate degree in Anthropology and Visual Culture) used the drum’s history of colonial resistance and contextualised it through the contemporary musical genre of gqom, showing music as both an act and celebration of joy and freedom and of defiance against the limitations of township life. Through her ‘speculative and imagined interconnectedness’ of the isigubu and gqom, Maledu appropriated the limited information available about the former and expanded it by reinventing new historical pathways that reframed colonial narrations and aesthetics (Maledu 2018: 29–30). Her curation broke the silence of the Kirby instruments and liberated the isigubu from its ethnomusicological framework through a juxtaposition that spoke back to history and the contemporary moment. In addition, a website provides a framework for historicising gqom and encouraged the growth of its archive through viewer engagement, also highlighting the speculative and stagnant colonial archive in which the isigubu is situated (Maledu 2018: 29–30)" (Liebenberg 2021: 211 - 212).

url

https://isigubuthroughgqom.wordpress.com/

Creator

Amogelang Maledu See all items with this value

Date Created

2018

Source

*Honours in Curatorship programme, Michaelis School of Fine Art, UCT
*Liebenberg, N. 2021. The virus and the vaccine: curatorship and the disciplinary outsider. University of Cape Town. Doctoral dissertation.
* Maledu, A. 2018. Isigubu through gqom: The sound of defiance and Black joy. BA Hons (Curatorship) research project, University of Cape Town.

Resonances

isigubu See all items with this value
Honours in Curatorship See all items with this value
Centre for Curating the Archive See all items with this value
drum See all items with this value
SA College of Music See all items with this value
Percival Kirby See all items with this value
Michael Nixon See all items with this value
taxonomies See all items with this value
instruments See all items with this value
medicine chest See all items with this value
KwaZulu Natal See all items with this value
drawer See all items with this value
cabinet See all items with this value
display See all items with this value
temperature See all items with this value
classification See all items with this value
comparison See all items with this value
technology See all items with this value
history See all items with this value
tribe See all items with this value
Kirby Collection of Musical Instruments See all items with this value
gqom See all items with this value
township See all items with this value
celebration See all items with this value
absence See all items with this value
archive See all items with this value
colonialism See all items with this value
empire See all items with this value
tax See all items with this value
hut See all items with this value
Zulu See all items with this value

Type

Photo
Exhibition

Contributor

Nina Liebenberg

Item sets

99_LBNNIN001
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