Art Matters: Inherited Histories and the Politics of Mapping

ABOUT

 Wits School of Arts Postgraduate Creative Research Conference

31 August to 2 September 2022

The Point of Order (Corner Bertha and Stiemens St, Johannesburg)

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.

Conference Format/Venues

The conference will be held in different venues at and around Wits and is not limited to the Wits School of Arts. We invite presentations and panels to take place in spaces outside of the usual formats of conferences: including walking lectures, play and experimentation in and with spaces.

While the duration of panels will be decided according to the submitted proposals, each panel is envisaged to not exceed 90 minutes, and individual presentations should be no longer than 20 minutes (please motivate if you require longer times for either).

Submissions

We welcome creative presentations by postgraduate students (incl. 4th years) across the Wits School of Arts. Participants need to motivate the relevance of their presentation as part of their proposed presentation.

We are open to further panel suggestions.

Abstracts and proposals should not exceed 250-300 words, and creative submissions must include any technical or spatial requirements (please note, that the conference cannot pay for expensive equipment or spaces), work samples should be limited to audio/visual works not exceeding 15 minutes or five visual works.

Registration will close on 15 August 2022

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