Prof. Rory Frederick du Plessis

Visited the IAS from November to December 2024

I am Rory du Plessis, a Professor in Visual Studies at the School of the Arts, University of Pretoria, South Africa. I have pioneered the investigation of photographic records from South African psychiatric facilities as a resource to humanise the subjects who were institutionalised in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I am the co-editor of the academic journal, Image & Text, author of the monograph, Pathways of Patients at the Grahamstown Lunatic Asylum, 1890 to 1907 (Pretoria University Law Press 2020).

During my stay at the University of Bayreuth, I installed my exhibition, I See You at Iwalewahaus. The exhibition marks the first international showing of nineteenth-century photographic portraits of South African people with intellectual disability. The photographic portraits were obtained from the casebook for the Institute for Imbecile Children, and the casebooks of the Grahamstown Lunatic Asylum. These casebooks constitutes one of South Africa’s largest archived records for people with intellectual disability (PWID) who were institutionalised from 1890 to 1920. In I See You I testify how the viewing of the casebooks’ content and photographs give rise to a personal recognition of the personhood of the PWID. The exhibition also includes poems that I composed to honour and memorialise each individual person who is included in the exhibition.

My stay in Bayreuth afforded me the opportunity to compose several more poems that will feature in my forthcoming poetry collection titled, Automaton(tik): In remembrance of the patients of the Fort England Psychiatric Hospital (ESI Press 2025).