Conferences
Monumental Developments: Contemporary Approaches to Commemorative Public Art | A conference hosted by the SARChI Chair in South African Art and Visual Culture
08 – 11 November 2023
#RhodesMustFall and #BlackLivesMatter has been of inestimable value in enabling critical attention to be focused on monuments that commemorate individuals associated with problematical values or events that were part of shameful histories. But the corrections to the public art landscape that #RhodesMustFall and #BlackLivesMatter have encouraged have usually been only to the people and events we would seek to have represented in the public domain. Those responding to their necessary calls for changes to the contemporary heritage landscape sometimes overlook other important shifts that have arisen in the last years of the twentieth century and in the new millennium – namely, ones concerning the nature of monuments themselves and how they function.
View the programme.
Indigeneity and Visual Sovereignty: Rendition, Heritage, Vision | A Conference at the !Khwa ttu San Cultural Heritage Centre, Cape Town, convened by Prof Staffan Löfving (Karlstad University and University of Johannesburg) and Prof Shanade Barnabus (University of Johannesburg).
27-8 April 2023
The SARChI Chair in South African Art and Visual Culture, in collaboration with the School of the Arts at the University of Pretoria, the Department of Language, Literature and Intercultural Studies at Karlstad University, the Department of Cultural Sciences at Linnaeus University and the Photographic Legacy Project, hosted a conference at the !Khwa ttu San Cultural Heritage Centre, Cape Town.
Visual sovereignty as an ongoing project of gaining access to the means and resources of self-representation sits at the centre of current debates in the field of visual culture. This conference offered a forum to discuss these debates in relation to indigeneity, language and photography across disciplines, in Southern African, Northern Europe, and beyond. The keynote address was by Keyan Tomaselli and Julie Grant from the University of Johannesburg.
View the programme.
Hitting Home: Representations of the Domestic Milieu in Feminist Art | An online conference hosted by the SARChI Chair in South African Art and Visual Culture
14 – 17 November 2022
This conference reconsidered how the home has been conceptualised in feminist art practices, both historical and recent. It engaged with how the domestic environment and its politics have been explored in feminist works from various geographies. It interpreted the ‘domestic environment’ or ‘the home’ in a broad sense, with the theme encompassing not only the politics of household labour but also family relationships and interactions as well as events structuring and changing domestic life such as marriage and childbirth.
View the conference programme and the list of participants.
Making and Interpreting Art in 2022 : A Conference and Exhibition for Honours and Masters’ Students in the Visual Arts
30 August – 01 September 2022
https://www.southafricanartandvisualculture.com/makingandinterpretingart
Making and Interpreting Art in 2022 brought together current work by young scholars and artists in South Africa as they explored and contended with many of the urgent issues of our times.
This virtual conference and exhibition, focused exclusively on Honours and Masters’ students in the Visual Arts and Art History, was hosted by postgraduates and postdoctoral research fellows with the NRF Research Chair in South African Art and Visual Culture at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa.
The conference was designed to allow young scholars to experience and participate in an academic conference while receiving guidance, feedback and support in navigating these spaces.
View the conference programme.
The exhibition offered young artists an opportunity to develop professional skills for proposing and exhibiting their artwork, especially in an online context. The virtual exhibition opening was held on Tuesday 30 August, with a virtual walkabout offered by the curator and a discussion facilitated with participating artists. The exhibition was live online for a month.
Disturbing Views: Visual Culture and Nationalism in the 20th and 21st Centuries
www.southafricanartandvisualculture.com
Speaking to Troubling Images: Visual Culture and the Politics of Afrikaner Nationalism (Wits University Press, 2020), a book of essays edited by Federico Freschi, Brenda Schmahmann and Lize van Robbroeck, this conference, like the new volume, was intended to raise debates that are especially timeous and urgent in a current context. The selected presenters spoke to one of two themes. How has art and visual culture been deployed to foster the interests of those who, in seeking to elicit support and power for only their own (perceived) nation or group, develop rhetoric and ideas underpinned by prejudice against groups conceptualized as outsiders? Alternatively, how has the visual domain served as a space for the critique and activist refusal of right-wing and exclusionary nationalist interests and discourse? The conference was postponed from April 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic and took place in a virtual format in November 2021. Click here to see the programme.
Making and Interpreting Art in 2021:A Conference and Exhibition for Honours and Masters’ Students in the Visual Arts 31 May – 01 June 2021
https://www.southafricanartandvisualculture.com/makingandinterpretingart
Making and Interpreting Art in 2021 brought together current work by young scholars and artists in Southern Africa as they explored and contended with many of the urgent issues of our times.
This virtual conference and exhibition, focused exclusively on Honours and Masters’ students in the Visual Arts and Art History, was hosted by postgraduates and postdoctoral research fellows with the NRF Research Chair in South African Art and Visual Culture at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa.
The conference was designed to allow young scholars to experience and participate in an academic conference while receiving guidance, feedback and support in navigating these spaces. The exhibition offered young artists an opportunity to develop professional skills for proposing and exhibiting their artwork, especially in an online context. The virtual exhibition opening was held on Monday 31 May from 17.00-18.00 and was live online for a month.
Click here for the conference programme.
Click here for the exhibition opening invitation.
Material Narratives: Public and Private Histories in Cloth 18 – 20 November 2019
Works of art made from or involving textiles or cloth (or works that are sewn or woven) often depict events and histories of significance. These may be occurrences with social and political import to communities, groups or countries, but they may also be incidents or experiences only of consequence to those who made the works concerned. While many works in cloth represent events directly, others allude to public or personal histories through their inclusion of motifs with symbolic or metaphoric associations. And while they may involve activism or offer socio-political commentary, often with feminist underpinnings, the act of narrating histories and representing events via cloth is also on many occasions a vehicle for self-reflection or the exploration of identities.
In this conference, the focus was on the multiple and varied ways in which textiles or fabric (or weaving or the use of embroidery, collage, printing and other techniques to work into cloth) have served as a way of representing events and histories with public or personal significance. Presenters focused on examples made by individual artists or those produced through collaboration or by collectives/community projects. They explored examples displayed in art galleries or those shown elsewhere in the public domain and focused on recent works or those from the second half of the twentieth century.
The conference took place at the offices of the NRF South African Research Chair in Art and Visual Culture. There was a post-conference trip to the Johannesburg Holocaust and Genocide Centre.
Brenda Schmahmann is editing a special issue of Image & Text: A Journal for Design, of articles drawn from selected conference papers. Image & Text is published by The University of Pretoria, and will be forthcoming in 2020/21.
Click here to view the Material Narratives: Public and Private Histories in Cloth Programme
Mistress-Pieces: Iconic Artworks by Feminists and Gender Activists 8 – 10 November 2018
In this conference, participants identified and explored a range of other works by feminists and gender activists that might be regarded as iconic in the sense that they have proved influential in particular contexts because of their relevance and distinctiveness. The topic was grounded in the understanding that the forms of art by feminists or LGBTI activists may have assumed, and their overall impact, differ from one geographical context to another. It was also underpinned by recognition that, given the momentous political and cultural shifts that have occurred since second-wave feminism began to exert impact on aesthetic practices in the United States, Britain and Western Europe, new works engaging with gender are necessarily inflected or shaped by different sets of concerns, whether these be related to the impact of the internet, social media and a digital age or new manifestations of violence, civil war and nationalism, threats to the environment or understandings of identity in the context of diasporas, for example.
“Mistress-Pieces” riffs on “Old Mistresses”, the ironical term that Roszika Parker and Griselda Pollock used within the title of their important volume first published in 1981. This conference did not seek to develop a history of women artists in the west, however, but rather focused specifically on artworks informed by feminist and gender discourses that have emerged since the 1970s in an international context. By offering this perspective, it is hoped that this conference, and the edited book that is to follow it, will enhance recognition of not only commonalities but also contrasts between different manifestations of gender politics in the visual arts.
The conference took place at the offices of the SARChI Chair in South African Art and Visual Culture. There was a post-conference trip to the Artists’ Proof Studio.
Brenda Schmahmann is editing a book of essays derived from selected papers presented at the conference, to be published by Routledge in 2021/2.
Click here for the Mistress-Pieces: Iconic Artworks by Feminists and Gender Activists Programme
Troubling Histories: Public Art and Prejudice 15 – 18 November 2017
Troubling Histories:
Public Art and Prejudice
15 – 18 November 2017
Delegates gathered in the research space of the SARChI Chair in South African Art and Visual Culture to discuss and debate issues and questions in regard to public art. Presenters were from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, Brazil, Sweden, Germany as well as South Africa.
A selection of the papers have been developed into articles included in two special issues of the peer-reviewed journal, de arte.
Taking History to Task: Cultural Vandalism and Memorial Mania a keynote presentaion by Erika Doss
Troubling Histories: Public Art and Prejudice 15 – 18 November 2017
Intertextual Textiles: Parodies and Quotations in Cloth 30 November – 2 December 2016
Images that refer self-consciously to other works of art or to well-known visual discourses have become increasingly commonplace in art since the late twentieth century. Unsurprisingly, strategies such as quotation and parody have also been deployed in numerous works made from textiles – whether these are in needlework or are constructed via processes such as collage or screen-printing on textiles, for example. In this conference, a range of these different examples were explored.
Intertextual Textiles: Parodies and Quotations in Cloth
Papers selected from “Intertextual Textiles” were developed into articles for a special issue of Textile: Cloth and Culture (volume 15, no. 4, 2017).
Click for link to the Introduction to the special issue https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14759756.2017.1337377