Arts Research Africa Conference 2020 Proceedings

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/handle/10539/29181

Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Arts Research Africa project in the Wits School of Arts consists of a range of activities designed to spark dialogue, stimulate practice, enable research and inspire collective engagement around the question of artistic research in Africa. With over 60 presentations, this first conference on artistic research in Africa, was held at the University of the Witwatersrand in January 2020.

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    Matshikiza’s King Kong Re-heard: A Pianistic Inquiry
    (Arts Research Africa, The Wits School of Arts, University of the Witwatersrand, 2020-07) Mnana, Yonela
    How did Todd Matshikiza, the famed Drum magazine reporter, pianist, and composer of King Kong, the South African hit musical of the 1950s, straddle these multiple worlds in his music? Drawing on my own experience as a jazz pianist, I attempted to answer this question through a performed analysis of an unreleased solo piano recording by Matshikiza. As a performer, my research aims to be not only about, but in the culture of South African solo jazz piano tradition.
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    Educational Emcees in the Academy: Spoken Word Poetry as Scholarly Praxis
    (Arts Research Africa, The Wits School of Arts, University of the Witwatersrand, 2020-07) Endsley, Crystal; Keith, Antony
    This new form of scholarship explores the theoretical, conceptual, and methodological possibilities for spoken word poetry to function as a social justice pedagogy and leadership praxis. Collectively, this research situates critical race theory, Black feminism, participatory action research, Hip-Hop, and artivism as epistemological positions that decolonize White, American, patriarchal ways of knowing and empirical methods of discovery.
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    ‘Godot-Logue in Gauteng’: Performance Practice as a (Re)presentation of Artistic Research
    (Arts Research Africa, The Wits School of Arts, University of the Witwatersrand, 2020-07) Lecogo-Zulu, Bongile; Ratladi, Calvin
    To what extent can devised collaborative performance practice be considered research? How does an artist whose practice is housed in interdisciplinary collaboration be recognised as a researcher? A performance demonstration (by Bongile Lecoge-Zulu and Calvin Ratladi) of Lucky’s monologue in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot will serve as commentary on the association of research with academia. Is there scope for reframing the associations around arts research to include the actual doing of the art?
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    Itinerant/Iterative Cartographies: Explorations in Cinematic Practices
    (Arts Research Africa, The Wits School of Arts, University of the Witwatersrand, 2020-07) Mntambo, Nduka
    The performance lecture served as an exegesis for the installation project on the city titled Asymmetries (2018/19/20). The installation and its various iterations were conceived as a making-thinking-spectatorial research project on the urban, premised on strategies developed through modes of artistic research. The project explores various forms of contemporary film practices in order to explore and re-imagine city life beyond the confines of teleological conceptions. In particular, the installation and its iterative explorations relates to cinema aesthetics and its political confrontation with the mono-focal conception of cinema and its projection norms.
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    Trash, Boer, and Brat – A Redemptive Theatre Performance
    (Arts Research Africa, The Wits School of Arts, University of the Witwatersrand, 2020-07) Khutsoane, Tshego; Nkosi, Les; Janse Van Vuuren, Petro
    Can an arts-based research enquiry reach into the silences between us as South Africans? This workshop on “Redemptive Theatre” showed how playing with dominant, habitual, and unpopular narratives can disrupt boundaries, challenge stereotypes, and, potentially, redeem us to each other.
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    Practices, Pedagogies, and Desires: Untethering Research
    (Arts Research Africa, The Wits School of Arts, University of the Witwatersrand, 2020-07) Andrew, David; Barry, Hedwig
    What does it mean to engage in artistic research over a period of a one-year Master of Arts in Fine Arts (MAFA) project? In this discussion, a student (Barry) and supervisor (Andrew) reflected on this digressionary trajectory from the vantage point of the Global South.
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    Dear Irreducibility’ … Approximating Uncertainty as a Queer Ethics of Relations
    (Arts Research Africa, The Wits School of Arts, University of the Witwatersrand, 2020-07) Athene, Nico
    This performance-lecture explored embodied, relational practice as an experiential site of queer, non-exploitative modalities.
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    Unintended Artistic Research on Memory, Masculinity, and African Beauty: The Case of Serurubele
    (Arts Research Africa, The Wits School of Arts, University of the Witwatersrand, 2020-07) Shoro, Katleho Kano
    What does it mean to re-evaluate ideas of beauty in Africa? Using performance as a research methodology and the idea of serurubele (“butterfly” in Sesotho and Setswana) as a heuristic device, this performance-lecture explored the value that critically engaging with people’s relationships with butterflies, butterfly-games, songs, and memories holds in the context of decolonial, African-centred scholarship. Could interrogating the idea of butterflies, as well as the tenderness that comes with black African men’s memories of butterflies, offer a more nuanced perspective of black masculinity and gender identity?
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    Opening Performance & Dialogue: Chant
    (Arts Research Africa, The Wits School of Arts, University of the Witwatersrand, 2020-07) Mahlangu, Nhlanhla; Taylor, Jane
    Chant is an astonishing piece, combining a potent engagement with Ritual as Theatre/Theatre as Ritual, and is a work through which Mahlangu explores his multi-dimensional and cross-generational relations as a source of performance energy. It thus has some elements that draw on a psychological and resolutely archaic mode of staging. Yet, the work also explores a form of hyper-modernity, with a vacuum-cleaner as a signifier for his grandmother, who raised him.
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    On the topic of interdisciplinary collaboration between art and music
    (Arts Research Africa, The Wits School of Arts, University of the Witwatersrand, 2020-07) Duby, Marc; Cooper, Paul
    This improvised performance drew from a shared body of knowledge in which the aesthetic outcome (as “product”) is considered as of lesser significance than the underlying artistic and creative processes (the real-time “making” aspect) underpinning the venture. This session explored processes of cooperative and circulatory reciprocity in a triangular encounter between musician, artist, and audience.