Arts Research Africa 2022 Conference - Introduction

Abstract

In the two years which have elapsed between the first and second Arts Research Africa conferences, the recognition of creative practice as a research modality in South Africa has increased in leaps and bounds. The question of what to call this research modality, be it practise-based, or practice-led, or artistic research remains unresolved, but these two conferences have gathered together a stimulating array of approaches to this new mode of research, while raising the banner for ‘artistic research’. This second conference, with its focus on how artistic research has transformed pedagogy as well as art practice in Africa, recognises that many academic practitioners, who have themselves completed advanced degrees with a creative practice component, are now looking to pass these learnings to their students through a transformed pedagogy. The 2022 conference thus provides an opportunity to assess the pattern of this development, still largely limited in Africa to the South African arts and education environment. The first ARA Conference was held as a live event on Wits campus in February 2020.1 Unknown to the organisers or any of the participants, the world was on the brink of the Covid-19 epidemic, and the draconian responses to the crisis by national governments, which locked down most of the world for the rest of 2020 and 2021. As a live event, however, the 2020 conference gave the ARA organisers the opportunity to experiment with different formats of presentation, breaking with the conventional mode of paper presentations and instead offering space for workshops and what we called ‘lecture-performances’ or ‘lecture-demonstrations’. The second conference, planned during the uncertainty that followed the waning of the pandemic in 2021/22, was initially envisaged as an entirely online event; but as the effects of the pandemic began to subside, we chose to offer the first two days as a purely online event to facilitate international engagement, and a third, final day, again on Wits campus, as a live face-to-face event. Sadly, as a result of this structure, the bulk of the 2022 conference presentations were conventional textual outputs, albeit often reporting on creative research that was embodied or performative in nature.