School of Arts - Arts Research Africa Project (Conference Proceedings)

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10539/38581

The Arts Research Africa (ARA) project at the Wits School of Arts, Wits University, is an initiative that explores the notion of artistic research in a decolonizing, Global South context. The project aims to advance the recognition of creative practice as a valid research modality in the South African context, while raising the banner for "artistic research" as an emerging field of study and inquiry in Africa. To achieve this goal the project is pioneering the exploration of artistic research approaches that challenge traditional academic boundaries and center African perspectives and methodologies.

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Full Proceedings - Arts Research Africa Conference 2020
(Arts Research Africa (ARA), 2020) Doherty, Christo
The full proceedings of the Arts Research Africa Conference 2020, held at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, from 22 - 24 January 2020. Description: An international conference organised by the Arts Research Africa project in the Wits School of Arts. The conference featured a wide variety of inputs, from traditional conference paper presentations and panels, to performances, interactive engagements and workshops. The conference brought together artists, scholars, and artistic researchers to collectively address the question of artistic research in Africa in the 21st century.
Creative practice and research: an artist-scholar perspective
(Arts Research Africa (ARA), 2020) Stewart, Michelle
How do measurable methods of research move between theoretical critique, technical reporting and creative practice? This question is explored with reference to her own practice-based PhD, the experimental animation, Big Man.
Opening address: dynamics
(Arts Research Africa (ARA), 2020) Schwab, Michael
Emphasises the changing fabric of knowledge and that artistic research has already had an effect on this fabric. Argues for a historical epistemology, and for unsecured forms of knowledge. Uses the experience of editing the Journal of Artistic Research to explain the challenges in operationalizing this concept of knowledge.
Artistic research in Africa with specific reference to South Africa and Zimbabwe: formulating the theory of Afroscenology
(Arts Research Africa (ARA), 2020) Ravengai, Samuel
How can artistic research offer the opportunity to create knowledge based on African practice and produced from the African context? This presentation will delineate seven approaches to artistic research and argue for decolonial imperatives.
Unpacking the Figure of the Artist-Fieldworker
(Arts Research Africa (ARA), 2020-07) Dash, Kathyayini
This paper argues that the meeting of practice and academic scholarship constructs the figure of the artist-fieldworker in critical ways, while also giving rise to particular kinds of ethical, formal, and procedural questions of art-making and research.
The philosophy of art in Ewe Vodu religion
(Arts Research Africa (ARA), 2020-07) Adjei, Sela Kodjo
How have miseducation and Eurocentric anthropological scholarship actively deluded Africans into perceiving their religion and arts as “inferior” and “barbarous”? Drawing from years of practice-based investigation into the art of the Anlo-Ewe Vodu religion, this paper interrogates and redefines the misleading theories of “fetishism” that have obscured the appreciation of Vodu art.
Inganekwane, folktale, Anansi Story: recognising indigenous knowledge in the performing arts
(Arts Research Africa (ARA), 2020-07) Foli, Jessica
What happens when the source of knowledge is part of a unique oral history passed down from generation to generation? How do we frame such knowledge? How do we nurture the development of knowledge based on African folktale, superstition, or myth?
Artistic Research and the Institution: a cautionary tale
(Arts Research Africa (ARA), 2020-07) Fleishman, Mark
What impact do the specific institutional contexts in which we produce research have on the artwork? What would an ethical approach to the work of art-making entail with reference to these institutional pressures/distortions?
A PhD in Practice-based Design Research in Architecture at Wits University
(Arts Research Africa (ARA), 2020-07) Felix, Sandra
How does the new PhD in practice-based design research in the School of Architecture at Wits position itself? This paper is an account of the author-practitioner’s exposure to the long history of engagement with design research in the school through the example of architects such as Pancho Guedes and others.
Wayfaring: a Muslim journey of becoming
(Arts Research Africa (ARA), 2020-07) Hoosen, Leyya
What are different ways of doing knowledge production and practice? This paper presents an approach to research that combines ethnographic analysis and poetic analysis. By using the structure as well as the content of the writing, this research seeks to explore the process of unfolding, during the dhikr, or practices of remembering, which occur for Sufi Muslim students as they seek spiritual knowledge within the conceptual and lived framework of wayfaring.
What is the potential of creative practice to enable new modes and strategies of research?
(Arts Research Africa (ARA), 2020-07) Moila, Molemo; Mokgotho, Nare; Gamedze, Thulile
This roundtable discussion served as an open sharing session where a selection of young practitioners could reflect on themes such as claiming knowledge in unknowable spaces, claiming knowledge outside the epistemic bounds of the academy, and praxis as a research feedback loop.
Editor's Introduction - Arts Research Africa 2020 Conference Proceedings
(Arts Research Africa (ARA), 2020-07) Doherty, Christo
Editor’s overview of the ARA2020 Conference. Explanation for the strategic emphasis on pan-African outreach, and the conference theme of “How does artistic research decolonise knowledge and practice in Africa?” Justification provided for the experimental format-architecture of the conference, and the use of “performance-lectures” as a new genre of conference presentation.
Thinking about research and creative endeavour
(Arts Research Africa (ARA), 2020-07) Olivier, Gerrit
Are the binary oppositions postulated between theoretical and practical knowledge, and between western and African philosophy—as in the call for this conference—valid or useful for artistic research? This paper asks where this conceptual division should best be located and poses the question of whether it is valid, sustainable, and helpful to distinguish between African and European “modes of knowledge.”
Decolonial AestheSis Parcours
(Arts Research Africa (ARA), 2020-07) Khan, Sharlene; Asfour, Fouad
The Decolonial AestheSis Parcours is made up of exercises informed not only by recent theories around decolonial aestheSis, but by Black and African Feminist creativities, Critical Race Theories, postcolonial histories, liberal arts pedagogies, and anti-hegemonial cultural movements. The workshop invites participants to reflect on non-hierarchical relationships, embodied knowledges, creative theorisation, the African Feminist concept of theorising from the epicentres of our agency, the use of imagination as a tool of freedom and experimentation, the need for interrogation of capitalist modes of artistic production, interconnectivities, as well as the need for critical pleasure.
Addressing artistic research at the Mahatma Gandhi Institute in Mauritius: challenges for a Small Island Developing State in Africa
(Arts Research Africa (ARA), 2020-07) Ramduth, Hans
Can small island contexts, through the extreme simplification of more complex processes that occur on the continents (e.g., ecocide), provide unique insights into binaries such as artist versus researcher, fiction versus non-fiction, and art-making versus writing?
Artistic research in music as Doctoral Study: challenges and opportunities for Universities in South Africa
(Arts Research Africa (ARA), 2020-07) Sandmeier, Rebekka
What are the opportunities and challenges of doctoral studies in South Africa, in music, through artistic research? What are the definitions of research— specifically artistic research—in the existing educational policies, and how can research and creative practice become one in a doctoral thesis?
Engaging with sound writing
(Arts Research Africa (ARA), 2020-07) Liebenberg, Visser
How can forms of sound writing be used for a project in artistic research? Based on the author’s own experimentation with sound writing for the clarinet, this paper argues that sound writing is a manner of engaging with sound that strengthens the link between practice and theory in artistic research.
Revisiting Dorothy Masuka’s Hamba Nontsokolo: tales of women, migrancy, and Jazz in the 1950s
(Arts Research Africa (ARA), 2020-07) Mzimela, Phumelele
How does a classic song like Nontsokolo, discussed and newly imagined, tell us a larger musical story that South African jazz history has forgotten? This paper revisits the “classic” vocal jazz piece Hamba Nontsokolo, which was composed, performed, and recorded by the late Dorothy Masuku in 1954. In contrast to the focus in the existing literature on the lives of black jazz singers and the socio-political contexts of their time, this paper examines the music of the song and offers a new arrangement, as a process of creative research, suggesting how the “classic” may be re-imagined today.
Closing address: Artistic Research in Africa - rethinking the "avant-garde"
(Arts Research Africa (ARA), 2020-07) Deribew, Berhanu Ashagrie
In order to implement artistic research in Africa need to recognize the different contexts - cultural, political and institutional – on our continent; and that artistic research is a subject not yet full clear in its function. The colonial model of the university has had the effect of “epistemicide” on indigenous knowledge. This aggravated by Western refusal to recognize traditions understand nature as Mother Earth with her own rights. Argues for a “rearguard” approach to art activism to learn from sources of embodied knowledge in communities.
Artistic Research as African Epistemology
(Arts Research Africa (ARA), 2020-07) Stolp, Mareli
Can artistic research be understood as an African epistemology? Through a mapping of the field of African epistemology together with the key notions of artistic research, this paper argues for the decolonising potential of artistic research in Africa.