—defunct context

For more on —defunct context, please visit the website https://defunctcontext.co.za/ and the Instagram page @defunctcontext.

—defunct context is a premise, research platform and curatorial strategy concerned with taking seriously the idea of personal archives. It investigates how history, memory, and knowledge are preserved and transmitted outside the structures of colonial inheritance. The framework offers a critique of perpetual coloniality, specifically targeting the problematic display practices and exclusionary knowledge production protocols that persist within ethnographic museums.

The platform actively facilitates research residencies for Dr. George Mahashe, other researchers/artists, as well as student projects, serving as a practical incubator for neglected scholarship and creative exploration. These residencies function as a form of peer review where varied documentation forms—from personal journals and ‘conversations’ to incantations and academic essays—are used to explore how different textual genres articulate specific subjectivities. Alongside these residencies, the platform supports publications that extend this research.

Anchored by the pavilion as a curatorial format, the platform frames these structures as mechanisms of spatial justice for practitioners not easily accommodated by traditional museum and gallery spaces. This focus emerged as a response to persistent colonial aesthetics within the refurbished Anthropology Museum at the University of Witwatersrand. It has since evolved to address the spatial limitations of an art school and the complexities of Lobedu material culture within colonial collections. In Gasekgopo, the site of Mahashe’s grandmother’s origin, the —defunct context pavilion functioned as an immersive exhibition space hosting a camera obscura on an abandoned hill, posing the question: “what kind of an image is land?”.

Currently, the platform focuses on how histories are carried beyond written records, drawing from memory, ancestral ways of knowing, and everyday materials. At the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale 2026, the platform manifested as a physical pavilion constituted of Mafadi (salt in various states) and multiple camera obscura images visible even at night. The structure offers a space for reflection on how archives are inherently carried within the body and the land, and how knowledge moves across generations.

—defunct context is a research project by Dr. George Mahashe, hosted around the theme of intangible heritage. The project has been supported by the UCT NRF BAAP grant, NIHSS Catalytic Research grant, and the Vice Chancellor’s 2030 Future Leaders grant.