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A Ground(ed) Elsewhere

7 - 9 September 2026

A Ground(ed) Elsewhere symposium on 7-9 September 2026 is a multidisciplinary programme developed with international and local partners. It brings together postgraduate students registered in art history, visual cultures, and curatorial practices, as well as lecturers from Stellenbosch University, Rhodes University, Tshwane University of Technology, the Michaelis School of Arts at the University of Cape Town, and the Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½ School of Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand. The Visual Cultures and Curatorial Studies (VCCS) Postgraduate Symposium fosters cross-university conversations guided by a desire to keep pace with emerging trends in creative and theoretical practices. The symposium was established in 2021 to enable students across different South African universities to learn from one another. The Curatorial, Public and Visual Cultures department at the Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½ School of Arts in Johannesburg is hosting the 2026 VCCS symposium. For 3 days, students and colleagues from various departments will present their ongoing research under this year’s theme, A Ground(ed) Elsewhere. There will also be Keynotes by invited thought leaders, including Dr Uhuru Phalafala, Anawana Haloba, and Professor kÄ…rî'kÄ…chä seid’ou.

A special aspect of this year’s symposium is that it coincides with the visit of guests from the Expanded Artistic Research Network: Curatorial Studies Workshop (EARN-CSWG). EARN-CSWG Members will join colleagues in Johannesburg, South Africa, for the Visual Culture and Curatorial Symposium in WITS, Johannesburg and in Livingston, Zambia, for the . The EARN-CSW organising group comprises , , Cătălin Gheorghe, and many other colleagues. EARN brings together researchers, educators and practitioners for knowledge exchanges on curating and the curatorial, specifically examining how curating provides critical tools for analysing archival practices. Some members of the EARN group will bring with them students from their programmes.

The theme for the Johannesburg symposium A Ground(ed) Elsewhere, is partly drawing upon Uhuru Phalafala’s work on forms of being, knowing, aestheticising, and doing from the Southern African Black cosmological archives. Phalafala interrogates here(ness) and elsewhere(ness) as sites of imagination, memory, and knowledge inherited from indigenous cosmologies. Invariably threading the two concepts to forms of matriarchal knowledge “a counter-cartography from the Black cosmological archive, one which maps and generates alternative forms of ontologies, relationalities and epistemologies.” These ideas of groundedness, framed within a cosmology that rejects the ocularcentric hierarchising of coloniality, also link with the Livingston Perennial theme of “Sonic Solidarities” for the Zambia leg.

From Johannesburg to Zambia. The Zambian leg, led by one of our PhD students, Lineo Segoete, and designed under the leadership of Anawana Haloba, the co-founder of LoCA, is scheduled to coincide with the opening of the Zambia Perennial, hosted by the Livingstone Office for Contemporary Art (LoCA). This is an important extension of the Johannesburg symposium to the Livingstone Perennial, as it is not just a showcase of the work of our students; it is a gesture of solidarity that also begins to map the diverse modes of curatorial practice on the continent beyond known cultural terrains.

This event launches new ways of thinking about mega art exhibitions in the African context. Instead of calling itself a Biennale, the Perennial is conceptualised around the infrastructure alternatives in our geographical region, which defy regulatory borders and immigration laws. Perenniality in this instance is a mode or method in which the sustainability of resources, economy and agency occurs. It is thought of as a process that allows rejuvenation within itself in that when something is running out, overused or outrun, it resuscitates itself or finds a way to adapt by necessity.. The collaboration between the Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½, the Curatorial Public and Visual Cultures department, and LoCA is designed as a response and an intellectual offering to this curatorial emergence. As one of the few schools in South Africa that offers formal training in curatorial practice, this conversation with the Zambian context is critical.

Further extending beyond Southern Africa context, the keynote invitation to Professor kÄ…rî'kÄ…chä seid’ou at Kwame Nkrumah University of Technology and a founder of blaxTARLINES, represents an unprecedented regional intellectual mapping of curatorial pedagogy. Born out of a “,” Professor Seid’ou is often credited with establishing and enabling the platform blaxTARLINES KUMASI. In his role as the harbinger of socially responsive artistic and curatorial practices and pedagogies in Ghana, the invitation positions Professor Seid’ou as an important interlocutor for both events at Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½ and LoCA, where he will deliver keynotes.

A Ground(ed) Elsewhere symposium will include various book launches, including CPaVC’s very own publication that maps the work of this department in curatorial pedagogies. There will also be networking events and a student exhibition in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut Johannesburg.

Keynotes Biographies

Dr Uhuru Phalafala

Dr Uhuru Phalafala is a writer, cultural historian, researcher, and archivist with research interests in critical race studies, anti-colonial social movements, indigenous epistemologies and cosmologies, and jazz. Her work draws from a historical wellspring of Black spiritual and creative intelligence, harnessing the dream-building energies of Black Atlantic expressive cultures and feminist creative ingenuity firmly rooted/routed in local African (diasporic) wisdoms of spirit and soil. She is a Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies at Stellenbosch University, and the author of Mine Mine Mine (2023) and Keorapetse Kgositsile & the Black Arts Movement: Poetics of Possibility (2024).

Professor kąrî'kąchä seid’ou

Professor kÄ…rî'kÄ…chä seid’ou is an artist-intellectual, poet, teacher, mathematician, and associate professor of modern and contemporary African Art in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Technology (KNUST). Recognized as Ghana’s leading figure in non-proprietary art, he conceived and implemented the “Emancipatory Art Teaching Project”, which fundamentally transformed the fine art curriculum at KNUST. He co-founded blaxTARLINES, an open-source and community-driven art collective inspired by his art practice and emancipatory pedagogy. His mentees and protégés flourish as artists, curators, scholars, and cultural professionals, forming the core of Ghana’s Contemporary and Post-Contemporary art waves. Although deeply influential, he chooses to work with quiet discretion.

Anawana Haloba

Anawana Haloba was born in Livingstone, Zambia, and lives and works in Oslo and Livingstone. She is one of the founders of the Livingstone Office for Contemporary Arts (LoCA), which is currently working on the “Mosi Oa Tunya Perennial”, a large-scale international exhibition to be presented in Livingstone, Zambia. Haloba was educated at the Evelyn Hone College of Applied Arts in Lusaka, Zambia, and completed her bachelor’s degree at the National Academy of Fine Arts in Oslo in 2006. She furthered her education at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Besides her extensive artistic practice, she is an Associate Professor of Contemporary Art, specialising in decolonial theory in artistic practice, at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, and a guest advisor at the Rijksakademie.

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