Call for Papers
Theme: A Ground(ed) Elsewhere
Abstract deadline: 3 July 2026
Abstract submissions: cpavc.wsoa@wits.ac.za
Conference Fee Students: R800.00
Conference Fee Academics: R1200.00
All postgraduate students registered in the fields of Curation. Art History, Fine Arts, Visual Studies, Interdisciplinary Studies, Heritage, Art and Design, and related fields and colleagues are invited to submit abstracts for: Chapters, Work in progress, Creative research findings, Book chapters, Collaborative writing and Critical reflections.
In the introduction to her seminal work, Keorapetse Kgositsile & the Black Arts Movement: Poetics of Possibility (2024), poet and thinker Dr Uhuru Phalafala accords an “otherwise grammar” to the illustrious corpus of Keorapetse Kgositsile. Broaching the varied sensibilities of the poet’s intention, Phalafala gestures towards the concept of elsewhere as a certain position, one that emerges notwithstanding the violences of the Hesperian corpus. Elsewhere, a location and/or a complex disposition with which to begin from, begets another imaginarium, one which is embodied and suffused with a situated orientation.
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, she opines declaratively when she states:
The matriarchive is a living repository of sound knowledges transmitted by matrilineal members of the family. These knowledges are rooted/routed in cosmologies and mythologies of the lineages and are at once intergenerational, communal, relational, and ancestral. They enshrine indigenous languages, names, songs, prayers, and rituals practised in the homeplace and actively materialize in their progenies’ lives and ongoing becoming (2024:6).
Tracing the influence of Kgositsile’s Setswana matriarchal heritage, Phalafala presents here(ness) as the grounded place of the artist’s embodied and community-rooted experiences; a praxis through which indigenous artistic practices emerge. Phalafala argues that artists working from these traditions, embody and deploy these forms of situated thinking, firstly as a sensibility of being in and of the world(s) they inhabit, as well as a way of comprehending its vicissitudes.
Taking into consideration, and working alongside Phalafala’s affective provocation, the symposium brings together a diversity of positions centred within curatorial thought. The coming together — a testing ground for a curatorial elsewhere, will interrogate the curriculum and varying modes of study; questions of institutionality and their effects within the present; situated practice in a context of contingent and inherited conditions, as well as the development of indigenous knowledges and their possibilities within arts-based education. The collectively held proposition explores situated grammars of practice that are not always set against power structures of the West, ones that might consider self-contained ecologies of here(ness).
What are the questions that we think hold this symposium:
- How can we argue for curatorial practices that are not marginal but constitutive of the modern and contemporary world?
- How can curating hold both rootedness and movement simultaneously?
- How might 'elsewhere' function not as exile or marginality, but as a productive epistemic position?
- What curatorial methodologies are necessary for working with knowledges that are ancestral and embodied?
- What would an institution grounded in indigenous cosmologies actually look like structurally and spatially? How can it work differently 'in time', or how can cyclical, ancestral, ritual, or cosmological times interrupt institutional time?
- How do indigenous temporalities interrupt linear exhibition or ongoing becoming?
- Can the archive be understood as atmospheric rather than documentary?
- How to approach ‘cultural differentiations’ and work with them in a curatorial mode?
- How are we able to move through the world while still being grounded by something that connects us to our indigenous selves?