This lecture series appraises (South) Africa’s contemporary art(ivism) as a key site and resource for direly needed ethico-political renewal and leadership often overlooked in the dominant focus on political, corporate, technological and scientific actors.

The series showcases on-going research on the aesthetic-ethical-political work performed by engaged artists, its multiple modes and strategies, its transformative potential and efficacy, as well as related risks and trouble spots. With the lectures series, ICE endeavours to facilitate and stimulate interdisciplinary and intersectoral conversations on art(ivism) as a singular mode of agency at the intersection of aesthetics, ethics and politics.

Dates:

14 August 2024: Pfunzo Sidogi (Tshwane University of Technology)

11 September 2024: Nomusa Makhubu (University of Cape Town)

9 October 2024: Carlos Castellano (University College Cork)

Further context:

In the 2015 preface to On the Postcolony, Achille Mbembe credited Africa’s aesthetic and imaginative disciplines for having been inspirational trailblazers in the early 1990s when established intellectual and political models became increasingly defunct. Mbembe here highlights their “paradoxical and at times risky play with both the limits set by moral or political orders and those that shape language and style, thought and meaning.” Africa’s creative and artistic practices are thus valued for their irreverent, transgressive play with exhausted moral, political, linguistic, aesthetic and conceptual frameworks, unlocking and imagining novel ways of feeling, being, doing, and thinking in the process.

More recently, at a turbulent period in post-apartheid South Africa heralded by events such as the 2012 Marikana massacre and the 2015 FeesMustFall protests, artistic actors were also at the forefront of the cultural, social and political ferment. Within or alongside emerging social movements, transgressive and imaginative aesthetico-political acts engaged enduring issues of socio-economic inequality, racial oppression, colonialist legacies, spatial exclusion, gender violence, patriarchic domination, cultural marginalisation, and their multiple intersections. While Mbembe was mainly inspired by African popular music and novels, more explicitly socially committed, “artivist” and public art practices played a prominent role at this later juncture, whether as creative conduits for societal discontent or by experimenting with more just or remedial social relations.