Wits School of Arts Postgraduate Creative Research Conference
Art Matters: Inherited Histories and the Politics of Mapping
Art Matters: Inherited Histories and the Politics of Mapping
Wits School of Arts Postgraduate Creative Research Conference
31 August to 2 September 2022
Theme: The student-led conference, organised by the Wits Fine Art department, invites postgraduate students across the Wits School of Art to submit presentations on the theme “Art Matters: Inherited Histories and the Politics of Mapping” and the multiple ways in which it can be interpreted. We welcome papers, presentations, lecture performances, sound pieces/walks, artworks, performances, choreographies, happenings, interventions or any other (creative) presentations.
The conference invites responses from the perspectives of the Global South by activating the sense of urgency in fellow students’ research projects. We welcome presentations that disrupt and question inherited practices of creative, discursive, historic, social, cartographic and relational mapping by broadening and teasing out different approaches towards its practices, which we understand not only as tools of knowledge-making but also as forms of knowledge.
Central to this conference is exploring why art matters: the significant role of art; when and how art can become active; how art can be used to reimagine society; as well as the potential of art for experimenting with unexpected ways of knowing and being. Thus, the conference encourages experimental presentations, so as to use art to interrogate dominant forms of knowledge. The conference aims to become a place to share new experiences of remembering and new onto-epistemologies.
The conference will be structured around, but is not limited to, the following six focus areas, which form preliminary provocations:
• Land and space: particularly the history of land in South Africa; greater themes of displacement, loss and dispossession; and thinking through the history of land ownership. • Mapping, cartography, geography: the role of art in imagining new ways of mapping; how creative practices can approach mapping differently and create different relationships to space. • Inherited ways of knowing and being and imagining new ways of learning: decolonial aestheSis and decolonising pedagogies. • Re-thinking presences, rememory and futures: ghosts, hauntology and lasting legacies of intergenerational trauma; the imagination of pasts as imagined futures, and possible futures as lost pasts. • Inheriting the Anthropocene and mapping connections for healing: ecological loss; the fracture of our ecological condition; planetary collapse; questioning the “racial blindness” (Yusoff, 2018) of the Anthropocene; and recuperation and healing. • Artistic and discursive mapping that disrupts, re-interprets, interrogates and heals through visual topographies
Register latest by the 18th of August 2022 (registration is free) here:
Find the call for abstracts here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aEM9uyo2KvFiu3YjtR4GWvPvC_jU1BJQ/view?usp=sharing
For further queries please contact the organising committee Chloë Shain, Londiwe Mtshali, Zodwa Skeyi-Tutani, Fouad Asfour, Camilla Pontiggia, Nomalanga Tyamzashe at WSOAPGconference22@gmail.com