09/09/2026
Meet the Artist | Professor Leora Farber
Meet Professor Leora Farber, one of the artists participating in Relational Trans_Positions: Research as an Act of Becoming, the 2026 FADA Creative Research Platform exhibition.
In this powerful installation, Farber draws analogies between Western ‘discoveries’ in the 17th and 18th centuries; early colonial empires; imperialism; slavery; colonial and contemporary global capitalist networks; settler-colonialism and bacterial growth.
She traces these lingering spectres of colonialism through cast fragments of recovered Delft porcelain sourced from a shipwreck off Cape Town’s west coast in the 1700s. The shards are remainders of colonial material culture that was brought to the Cape colony, along with slaves, by the Dutch East India Company (VOC). They are translated into casts made from agar, onto which blue and white patterns have been painted using pathogenic E.coli bacteria. The casts to speak to both the demise of settler colonial culture, and the ways in which, as material objects, they form spectres of South Africa’s colonial afterlives which act as hauntologies that still inhabit and regrow in the present. The proliferation of the bacterial colonies over the casts echo the historical pathways of colonisation, thereby highlighting its relationship to power, influence and expansion.
Exhibition Opening
10 September 2026 | 17:30 for 18:00
FADA Gallery, UJ Bunting Road Campus
RSVP and full details via the link in our bio.
