Mediating Past, Present and Future: Dialogues with Global South experiences

Taking place at l’Académie des Beaux Arts (ABA) in Kinshasa, this 4-day workshop looks at the interstices between history and art (especially from and about the Congo), with a focus on creative methodologies and shared issues around the teaching of art in the Global South. Local concerns will be highlighted through dialogues between engaged theorists, researchers, arts practitioners and educators. Public talks will take place each morning, to be followed by closed workshop sessions made up of small, themed working groups.

The project is a cross-disciplinary collaboration between Kinshasa (l’Académie des Beaux Arts, Democratic Republic of the Congo), Johannesburg (Wits School of Arts, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa) and São Paulo (Universidade Federal de São Paulo, Brazil).

Project Concept & Format:

The workshop revolves around 2 main axis of (i) the relationships between historical narratives and artworks, alongside (ii) South-South dialogues in arts education. Comparative, cross-disciplinary methodologies and mutual points of destabilisation will be drawn out. Public sessions with 2 or 3 main speakers and respondants will take place each morning.

Afternoon sessions will take the form of focus groups of 5/6 people who will work together in the afternoons (the locations of these will be announced at the open morning sessions for members of students public that wish to join). Each group will consist of 2/3 visitors interacting with local partipants. Artist presentations & film screenings will be integrated throughout the event. Working groups will include feedback sessions from artist-educators (Ayrson Heráclito, BR; Natasha Christopher & Donna Kukama, SA) who will conduct student projects at ABA in the week of 11 – 15thJanuary, 2016, prior to the main event. The outcome of these sessions with artists and students will be displayed in the Institut Francais de Kinshasa’s Halle de la Gombe gallery space.

Suggested central themes around which the focus groups will be clustered:

•Education / pedagogy from the South

•Imaging Violence

•Exhibition histories

•The art institution and decolonization

•Comparative Methodologies

•Artworks as History

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