Goethe-Institut Library Presents Nothing to Commit Records

Bios

• Bhavisha Panchia

  Bhavisha Panchia is a curator and writer, whose work centres on the social, cultural and ideological signification of sound and music in contemporary culture. With an interest in auditory media’s relationship to geopolitical paradigms, anti/postcolonial discourses and imperial histories, she considers how we can critically listen back to listen forward. She is the founder of Nothing to Commit Records, a label and publishing platform committed to the production and expansion of knowledge related to contemporary art and sound within and across the global South. Her writings have been published in books, journals and exhibition catalogues. Exhibitions and programmes that Panchia has curated in include Frequencies, MOCA Tucson (2025), Sounding a Black Grammar, Performa Biennial (2023),  ’32: The Rescore, Sharjah Art Foundation (2019–2020),  For the Record, ifa-Galerie, Berlin (2018); writing for the eye, writing for the ear, Centre for the Less Good Idea, Johannesburg (2018); and Buried in the Mix, MEWO Kunsthalle, Memmingen (2017).

• Laurence Hamburger

  Laurence Hamburger (1971) is a South African filmmaker, writer and creative, probably best known for his global success as a director of  TV commercials. For over 20 years his work for VW, Nandos, Ikea, Toyota and Sony amongst others won numerous awards, including the prestigious Cannes Advertising Journalist’s Prize and the SA Loerie Grand Prix. His work in publishing began in 2013 with “Frozen Chicken Train Wreck”, a collection of real SA newspaper headline posters, soon to be an art exhibition and website. His next book, ‘Black Plastic’, which he is co-producing and initiated, is a conceptual design book investigating the extraordinary stories around the covers of township pop record covers from 1974-1994.
   

• Dr. John Peffer

  Dr. John Peffer is Professor of Art History at Ramapo College in New Jersey. His work foregrounds creative interventions that engage troubled histories. His writing and curating has examined the historiography of African Art History, art and visual culture in South Africa during apartheid, and wider issues of global modernity and human rights in art, photography, visuality, and sound. He is the author of Art and the End of Apartheid (Minnesota, 2009), and co-editor of Photography and Portraiture in Africa (Indiana, 2013). Recent projects have approached historical issues using creative non-fiction strategies, including Notes on Cuts (Nothing to Commit Records, 2023), a vinyl record-and-book project that explores physical damage done to records by censors at the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) during apartheid, and the book, Private Subjects: Family Photography in South Africa and the Right to Opacity, to be published by Duke University Press in November 2026.