: : ? 33 South Africans in Britain. Fourteen choir singers from the Eastern Cape travelled on tour to London in 1891, with the aims of raising money for a technical college in South Africa. The singers appeared at a number of events, and most notably performed for Queen Victoria and the British gentry and nobility of that time. Each choir member was individually photographed at the London Stereoscopic Company. In particular, the images where the choir members look outwards, directly at the viewer, create a collapsed illusion of time and space. Although the photographs are more than 125 years old, they have a distinctly fresh, contemporary quality. In this spirit, South African composers Philip Miller and Thuthuka Sibisi have reimagined the original 1891 musical programme, with 14 contemporary South African singers. This new musical composition features in the exhibition as a five-channel sound installation that accompanies the choir members’ photographs. Prominent choir members included Charlotte Maxeke, one of the founders of the Bantu Women’s League, the organisation that would become the ANC Women’s League. Following London, Maxeke travelled with the choir to the United States, and subsequently enrolled at Wilberforce University, where she was taught by W.E.B. DuBois. Upon her graduation, Maxeke became the first black woman from South Africa to earn a doctorate in Arts and Humanities. Throughout her career, Maxeke devoted much of her activism to women’s rights, and was an organiser in the early anti-pass movement. Her sister Katie Manye, who was also a member of the African Choir of 1891, later qualified as a nurse and was a strong advocate for quality healthcare for women. W.E.B. DuBois’s compilation of the photographs for the American Negro exhibit at the Paris Exposition of 1900 was primarily intended to portray the humanity and dignity of their subjects, and had a direct political focus. At the time of the exhibit, DuBois was a professor of sociology at Atlanta University, and like his student Maxeke, he dedicated his life’s work to the equality and liberation of African Americans. While slavery in the United States had officially ended in 1865, discrimination persisted. To combat prevailing racist attitudes and beliefs about African Americans, DuBois compiled photographs of African Americans in a variety of scenarios that included law students at Howard University, trainee dentists working with patients, and working women in tobacco factories. This rare and seminal historical collection will be exhibited in South Africa for the first time as part of Black Chronicles IV. To coincide with the opening of Black Chronicles IV, VIAD and UJ Arts & Culture will also be hosting a three-day conference entitled Curatorial Care, Humanising Practices: Past Presences as Present Encounters. Using the exhibition and photographic portraiture as a departure point, the conference will attract an exciting and dynamic group of curators, academics, artists, cultural practitioners, and heritage specialists to engage with the current debates in contemporary curatorial practice. A primary concern within this proposed discourse is the shift from traditional curatorial practice, as traditionally bound to a colonial logic of collection, towards an ethical recourse to curatorial care – where contemporary practices linked to traditional understandings of curating, as a “caring for objects”, are reconstituted in relation to (re)- acknowledged subjectivities. Through the presentation of academic papers, panel discussions, screenings and performances, the conference will function as an interdisciplinary platform. Both the conference and the exhibition include a comprehensive educational programme that engages with FADA undergraduates, and students from photography and visual art programmes throughout Gauteng. Black Chronicles IV raises important questions around representation, the politics of cultural assimilation, and the power of images in the proliferation of political ideas and advocacy for human rights – all of which are issues still pertinent to many South Africans. BlackChroniclesIV::13April–31May FADAGallery,UniversityofJohannesburg,BuntingRoadCampus CuratorialCare,HumanisingPractices:PastPresencesasPresent EncountersConference::11–13April UJArtCentre,UniversityofJohannesburg,AucklandPark, KingswayCampus :: Aime Soudien Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre (VIAD ) Curator & Researcher