Dr Rachel Baasch
Dr Rachel Baasch is an alumni of the NRF post-doctoral research in the Arts of Africa and the Global South Research Programme in the Department of Fine Art at Rhodes University. Baasch completed a Masters in Fine Art specialising in sculpture and installation (2013) and a PhD in Art History (2017) at Rhodes University. Born in Kwa Zulu Natal in 1987, she has based herself in Grahamstown for the last ten years. Her practical and theoretical interests lie in the intersections and connections that can be identified between different geographical and ideological spaces within the ‘global South’, especially those that transgress seemingly impermeable boundaries and forge new pathways through sites of socio-political division. While engaging in fieldwork research for her doctoral degree she lived in Ramallah in the West Bank between 2013 and 2014 where she developed her own research methodology of Looking with the Skin as a sensitive and embodied response to the challenge of conducting ‘research’ within a Palestinian context. Focusing on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, her Doctoral dissertation titled Visual Narratives of Division in Contemporary Palestinian Art and Social Space analyses the ways in which the Israeli apartheid wall and checkpoint security system create monumental and traumatic divisions in social and architectural space. Using her methodology of Looking with the Skin, Baasch studies the artworks of Palestinian artists who use their works to create openings, cracks and loopholes that signal the possibility for the physical and psychological transgression of these seemingly impenetrable structures of division. Baasch believes that artists can make the human world a better place to live in and that artistic practice is one way of forging new connections in an increasingly disconnected and divided world.
Last Modified: Fri, 06 Aug 2021 10:27:52 SAST