The 2nd International Conference on Artistic Research in Africa, will take place from 14 - 16 September 2022, online and at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.
The 2022 Conference is organised around the question: How does Artistic Research transform arts pedagogy and arts practice in Africa?
The 1st ARA Conference in 2020 asked how artistic research decolonises knowledge and practice in Africa. What emerged as a common theme from the 1st conference was the insistence that artistic research can and must play a vital role in the development of a decolonised university in Africa, not simply by interrogating the inherited epistemological structures of the research university, but also through the deconstruction of many of the deep mythologies of western art. See the 2020 Proceedings at https://hdl.handle.net/10539/29248
The 2nd Conference, while continuing to encourage debate into the political and epistemological implications of artistic research in Africa, seeks to showcase the transformative work that has been taking place in pedagogy, research, and artistic practices. The ARA2022 Conference will facilitate the sharing, discussion, and critique of this work going forward.
While in 2022 we are recovering from the restrictions of the Covid-19 lockdowns, the environment remains uncertain. Accordingly, the 2nd Conference will be structured as two days of online engagements (on the 14th & 15th September) and one day of physical events at Wits on the 16th of September.
Expect an intellectually stimulating ARA2022 conference with presentations, performances and panels covering the following themes which are emerging as foci for artistic research in Africa.:
- Artistic research developments in Africa/Global South
- Creative research in Architecture and Design
- Curation as artistic research
- Dissemination and archiving of artistic research
- Performance as research
- Artistic research in the Medical Humanities
- Research through material cultures and indigenous performance
- Art~Science and the spaces of unknowing
- The body as a site of artistic research
- Tacit knowledge and artistic research
- The challenge of peer review/assessment of artistic research
- Reports on postgraduate programmes in artistic research