Arts Research Africa Dialogues

In this dialogue, Prof Christo Doherty, the Chair of Research in the Wits School of Arts, speaks to Ariane Koek, a prominent British independent producer, curator, and writer, recognized globally for her pioneering work at the intersection of art and science. With a career spanning several decades Ariane is particularly noted for founding the Arts at CERN program, which she designed and directed from 2009 to 2015. This initiative was the first official international arts program at CERN and aimed to foster collaboration between artists and scientists. Under her leadership, the program included various residency opportunities for artists, allowing them to explore and interpret scientific concepts through their creative practices.

The project has just been awarded the Grand Prize - Innovative Collaboration at Ars Electronica 2024. The prize recognises innovative collaboration between industry or technology and the arts (and the cultural and creative sectors in general) that opens new pathways for innovation.

In this podcast we focus on the Arts at CERN project, a curatorial and political challenge that Ariane launched single-handedly in 2010. CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is an intergovernmental organization comprising 24 member states, that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world situated in a vast complex based outside Geneva in Switzerland. CERN's main function is to provide particle accelerators and other infrastructure needed for high-energy physics research. The lab's most notable project is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest and highest-energy particle collider, consisting of a 27-kilometre ring of superconducting magnets. The Centre has approximately 2,660 scientific, technical, and administrative staff members, and in 2019 hosted about 12,400 users from institutions in more than 70 countries. 

We do a deep dive into the experience of setting up the Arts at CERN programme and the lessons Ariane learnt from working with artists and scientists in such a challenging context. We then go on to unpack Ariane’s more recent insistence that we need to go beyond the acceptance of art-science collaborations as “de facto” positive and the implications of this insight for her current work as a producer and curator. Finally we touch on the continuing importance of aesthetics in both contemporary art and science while recognising the different meaning of the term "beauty" in artistic and scientific discourses. Ariane Koek's personal website with links to her writings and curatorial practice · The award citation for the 2024 Grand Prize - Innovation at Ars Electronica. · Troika at the Langen Foundation, September 2024 - Pink Noise · The website of Julius von Bismarck - the first artist in residence on the Arts at CERN programme

In this dialogue, Prof Christo Doherty, the Chair of Research in the Wits School of Arts, speaks Ale de la Puente, an independent artist-researcher from Mexico who is doing a residency in Johannesburg as part of the Goethe Institute’s international Studio Quantum programme.

Ale has studied industrial design, goldsmithing, boatbuilding, navigation, astronomy, physics, and philosophy. She is known for her poetic and conceptual explorations of time and space across a wide field of mediums, ranging from installations and sculptures to drawings, photography, and video, including art science expeditions in search of symbolic natural phenomena, how we signify them, and how, very importantly, we relate to the given meanings in art and life.

Ale is a fellow of the National System of Arts Creators in Mexico. She has exhibited her work both nationally in a wide range of international galleries from the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico to the Polytechnic Museum (Moscow) and the Bass Museum of Art, in Miami, Florida to name but a few. Her work is part of leading public and private collections.

Ale first developed art-science projects in collaboration with the Astronomy Institute and Nuclear Science Institute of National Autonomous University of Mexico, UNAM, going on to work with the Schmidt Ocean Institute in California, the Roscosmos in Russia, and the Kosmica Institute in Berlin and Mexico City. Amongst her many collaborations with scientists are the projects "Desire", "Matters of Gravity" and "Finding the Centre" which we will discuss in this podcast, as well as the project she is beginning in Johannesburg as part of the Goethe Institut’s Studio Quantum initiative - an international events and artist-in-residence programme which is exploring emerging quantum technologies through the lens of art.

In this podcast we discuss how Ale came to art practice, beginning with her accidental discovery of Industrial Design and her first art-science collaborations with the Institute of Astronomy at the National Autonomous University of Mexica. We then unpack what went into the public space art-intervention she called "Desire" where , working with artisan firework craftsmen, she built an artificial comet that flew in the evening sky above Mexico City in 2016. We explore how she navigates the challenges as an artist engaging with the scientific lab through her experience of working at the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN) where she has had two residencies, We then look at her collaborative project with 6 other artists called Matters of Gravity (2012-14), where they elaborated the different implications of zero gravity using the facilities at Star City in the Yuri Gagarin Cosmosnaut Training Centre outside Moscow. Finally we discuss the lessons that Ale has drawn from her extensive engagement with scientists working in a wide variety of disciplines and how she is going about her work on her project, entitled "Is it going to rain" with the Quantum Studio project in Johannesburg.

Useful links to Ale’s project website and other information and can be found in the show notes for this podcast. Ale de la Puente - artist's portfolio website · Schmidt Ocean Institute - Ale de la Puente · Studio Quantum: An international events and artist-in-residence programme from the Goethe-Institut, exploring emerging quantum technologies through the lens of art. · Matters Of Gravity.pdf — PDF (7.4 MB)

In this dialogue, Prof Christo Doherty, the Chair of Research in the Wits School of Arts, speaks to Dr Ralph Borland, an independent artist-researcher and curator based in Cape Town. Ralph has a degree in Fine Art from the University of Cape Town, a Masters in Interactive Telecommunications from New York University and a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland. His PhD was a critique of first world design interventions in the developing world. His subsequent post-doctoral work at UCT focused on the African city and North-South knowledge inequalities. He has continued to purse his interest in democratisation and the creative use of emerging technologies with projects such as African Robots, his collaboration with Southern African street artists where he helped them introduce electronics and mechanics to their practice. His art-design piece, Suited for Subversion, a protective and performance suit for street protest in the New York Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection. He co-curated the exhibition Design and Violence at the Science Gallery in Dublin in 2016 and Future Present: Design in a Time of Urgency at the Science Gallery in Detroit. He has just completed a fellowship in the Institute for Humanities in Africa at UCT which he concluded with the exhibition Aesthetic Interventions in Artificial Intelligence in Africa which featured the remarkable collaborative work BoneFlute which we discuss in some detail in this podcast.

In this podcast, we discuss how Ralph came to art practice and his first degree, majoring in sculpture, in Fine Art at Michaelis. We examine his lateral move into electrical engineering with his PhD at Trinity and the curatorial work he did at the Dublin Science Gallery. We then unpack in detail his most recent collaborative, and ongoing artistic research project, with the orthopaedic surgeon Dr Rudolph Venter, the flutist, Alessandro Gigli, and the film-maker Dara Kell. Finally we consider the relationship between artistic practice, research, and activism. Ralph Borland's artist's home page · information around Ralph's exhibition AIAIA – Aesthetic Interventions in Artificial Intelligence in Africa, which showed art-research work from my fellowship on the Future Hospitals project at HUMA, the Institute for Humanities in Africa at the University of Cape Town · Ralph's Boneflute project site · Bone Flute - Brief - 2024.pdf — PDF (5.4 MB)

In this dialogue Prof Christo Doherty, the Chair of Research in the Wits School of Arts, speaks to Miranda Moss, a South African artist, outsider-engineer, eco-geek, and rogue educator who is currently based in Sweden. Miranda’s transdisciplinary practice, which focuses on the problematics and hopeful possibilities of technology from a socio-ecological and anticolonial feminist perspective, has seen her exhibit, teach, and perform research internationally in a variety of art, science, community, academic, public, and hacker spaces.

Miranda graduated with a  Bachelor of Art in Fine Art, with a distinction in sculpture from the Michaelis School of Art, UCT, in 2012 . In 2017, she was the recipient of the Pro Helvetia / Artists-in-Labs residency, where she was stationed in a phytopathology laboratory at the Swiss Federal Institute for Snow, Forest and Landscape near Zurich, investigating the colonial weight of “invasive alien” microorganisms. In 2020, she was awarded the konS Platform for Contemporary Investigative Art’s project production grant alongside collaborator Daniel Brownell, for a work reimagining factory farming and robotics and working alongside agri-tech scientists.

In 2021, she completed a Masters degree in Sustainable Design at LNU in Sweden, where her thesis project, “Power Harvest; explorations in regenerative energy technologies within the (post) colonial climate emergency” involved distilling cutting edge scientific experiments into poetic, artistically articulated, and accessible forms of engagement. The project entailed developing a low-cost, DIY system for making electricity, fertilizer, and safely-treated water from human urine, in response to the oppressive technocoloniality inherent in post apartheid South Africa’s straining electrical, water, and sanitation urban grid systems.

She has just embarked on a 3 year long collaborative research project titled “Regenerative Energy Communities; artistic and collective energy experiments for resilient agriculture” funded by the Swedish Energy Agency’s Program for Energy, People, and Society.

In this podcast, we discuss how Miranda came to art practice and her first degree in Fine Art at Michaelis. We also examine her engagement with scientific research and her understanding of art as a form of research. We then explore, in some depth, her experience as an artist based in the laboratories of the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow, and Landscape in Zurich and the impact that this had on her understanding of art and research. Finally, we unpack the work she did for her MA in Sustainable Design and her move into the world of Regenerative Energy and the potential applications of this thinking in South Africa. The outcome of Miranda MA's project · Miranda's post Arist-in-Lab (AiL) residency exhibition · Miranda's own website · Regenerative Energy Communities, Växjoö, Sweden

In this dialogue Prof Christo Doherty speaks to Professor Nathaniel Stern, an artist, writer and teacher who holds a 50/50 dual appointment at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee as a Professor in Art and Design and Mechanical Engineering where “he teaches artists how to engineer, engineers how to art, and everyone how to sustain their work with entrepreneurial thinking.”

Nathaniel’s most recent art project, a travelling exhibition, called "The World After US (TWAU): Imaging techno-aesthetic futures", is a fascinating and constantly mutating physical melange of botany and discarded electronics that challenges viewers to imagine “what our digital media will be and do in the world after us”. One aspect of the TWAU project, called "The Wall After Us", was was recently featured as part of the SYM|BIO|ART exhibition at University of Johannesburg. The exhibition launched the newly formed Creative Microbiology Research Co-Lab at the University of Johannesburg led by Prof Leora Farber.

Nathaniel also has a long association with Johannesburg and the Wits School of Arts. With a Masters from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University, he was responsible for designing and teaching the first years of the Interactive Media studio programme in the Digital Arts department. Over that time he also won the Brett Kebble Art Award in both 2003 and 2004, thus earning the first recognition for interactive and digital art in the South African art world. Following his time in Johannesburg, he went on to do a PhD in Mechanical Engineering at Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland writing his dissertation on interactive art and embodiment.

Since his PhD, Nathaniel has created a dazzling range of exploratory art projects, often in collaboration with other artists, scientists and engineers. In fact the journal Scientific American says Stern’s art is “tremendous fun,” and “fascinating” in how it is “investigating the possibilities of human interaction and art.” I urge listeners to visit his website to get a grasp of the extent of his artistic and writerly practice. In this discussion, we talk about the TWAU project; and the experience of installing the "The Wall After Us" working remotely from the US together with the curatorial team at the FADA gallery. We also explore Nathaniel’s thinking about aesthetics and the relationship between aesthetics and activism, especially the climate activism that is central to his work. Finally we unpack the Startup Challenge which Nathaniel directs at Lubar Entrepreneurship Centre at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. I think that the expanded notions of both innovation and entreprepreneurship that Nathaniel deploys in the programme are of great value for similar work at Wits, and in South Africa more broadly.

Useful links to Nathaniel’s website, books, exhibitions, and papers:

His website: https://nathanielstern.com

His latest published paper, together with Johannes Lehmann and Rachel Garber-Cole: "Novelty and Utility: How the Arts May Advance Question Creation in Contemporary Research". Leonardo (2023) 56 (5): 488–495. DOI https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_02400

The TWU site, with downloadable PDF of the exhibition catalogue and a video documentary: https://nathanielstern.com/text/2020/catalog-the-world-after-us/

https://nathanielstern.com/artwork/documentary-the-world-after-us/

Nathaniel's first book, with downloadable intro chapter:

Ecological Aesthetics: artful tactics for humans, nature, and politics 

https://nathanielstern.com/text/2018/ecological-aesthetics/

The Lubar Entrepreneurship Centre webpage: https://uwm.edu/lubar-entrepreneurship-center/student-startup-challenge/#

In this dialogue Prof Christo Doherty speaks to Professor Bruce Barton the Director of the University of Calgary’s School of Creative and Performing Arts, and the Co-Artistic Director (with Pil Hansen) of Vertical City, an interdisciplinary performance hub they co-founded in Toronto in 2007.

Bruce is a teacher and theorist of artistic research and is also a top creative practitioner. He has extensive experience as a director, playwright, dramaturg, and designer with numerous intermedial performance companies across Canada and internationally. In addition he has published widely and edited both major peer-reviewed and professional journals and is the editor/contributor of seven books, most recently the seminal collections, Performance as Research: Methodology, Knowledge, Impact in 2017 and At the Intersection between Art and Research in 2010.

Bruce has also been very active in scholarly organisations. He was the founder and co-convenor of the “Articulating Artistic Research” Seminar at the Canadian Association for Theatre Research,IFTR, which he began in 2012. He is also a co-convenor of the Performance as Research Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research and the Artistic Research Working Group of Performance Studies international (PSi). It was his involvement with these organisations that brought him to Africa last month where he participated in the first African IFTR Conference in Ghana, followed by the first African PSi Conference held in Johannesburg, and hosted by the Wits School of Arts.

Christo caught up with him shortly after his return to Canada to discuss his experience of the two conferences in two different African cities, the differences between the IFTR and PSi and the value of such scholarly organisations to emerging scholars. We then untangle the terminology around Performance as Research and Artistic Research before considering Bruce's key terms for evaluating Artistic Research: Methods, Knowledge, and Impact. Finally we explore the very exciting work that he has done, with his creative partner, Pil Hansen, with the Vertical City Performance in Toronto, particularly their innovative engagements using performance into the fields of cognitive science,and cognitive philosophy. Performance Research Knowledge · Vertical City Performance · International Federation for Performance Research · Perfromance Studies International

In this dialogue Prof Christo Doherty, the Chair of Research in the Wits School of Arts, speaks to Prof Tanja Sakota, an artistic researcher, writer, and filmmaker in the Department of Film & Television in the Wits School of Arts. Tanja is the author of an important new book, just published by Wits University Press, called Uncovering Memory: Filming in South Africa, Germany, Poland, and Bosnia/Herzegovina.

Tanja has had more than 20 years of experience in the academic teaching of film and television, and Uncovering Memory is her first book publication. I’ve been looking forward to talking to her about her book, which appeared in March 2023, because I regard it as an important advance in the application of artistic research in South Africa. In this discussion we unpack her account of the ways that she uses the camera as a tool for research to uncover memory traces as they become accessible through architecture, sites and locations in landscape and city spaces.

A striking aspect of her approach as a researcher and practitioner is how her practice draws directly from the learnings she has derived from her problem-based teaching in the classroom with South African and European students and academic peers, notably in the wake of the #FeesMustFall protests which disrupted Wits campus in 2015/16. Her research practice is also informed by the deeply personal experience of trauma, both her parent’s shattering experiences of trauma as children during the final years of WWII in Europe and her own personal experience of trauma while she was undertaking this research. We examine the way that these traumatic experiences, both transgenerational and personal, motivated her turn towards auto ethnography and the manner in which she has blurred the boundaries of theory and practice with modes of creative writing in the production of her book. Finally we discuss her trajectory, over the course of her research and writing, from a notion of practice-based research to artistic research.

Useful links to the films discussed in this podcast and Tanja's book can be found in the show notes below. Tanja's book, Uncovering Memory, published by Wits University Press · The Wits student film discussed in the podcast: Lurking Silhouettes by Shubham Metha. · The Wits student film discussed in the podcast: Johannes comes to Town by Boitumelo Molalugi · Tanja's research film, Shattered Reflections, as discussed in the podcast and her book.

In this dialogue, Prof Christo Doherty, the Chair of Research in the Wits School of Arts, speaks to Doris Bloom, a multidisciplinary South African artist who has been based in Denmark since 1976. She currently has a major exhibition called Bird Bone Whistler at the Origins Centre Museum in Johannesburg until 02 July 2023.

Doris was born on a farm outside Vereeniging and her deep imaginative engagement with the African landscape has powerfully informed her work over the last 46 years. She began her career by studying ceramics at the Johannesburg College of Art and then a Masters in contemporary art at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art in Copenhagen. She is best known as a painter and printmaker as well as a performance artist, often performing in front of her finished works or, as she did at the opening of her Origins Centre exhibition, creating an artwork in front of her audience. Doris has received numerous awards and public commissions and has exhibited internationally.

In this discussion we talk about the path she followed to become an artist, and explore her movement into performance in 2003 and the way that she has mapped a visceral discourse of body, language and memory. We also examine the ways in which her work engages with the sciences of palaeontology and archeology and the significance of visual technologies such as VR for her practice as an artist working in collaborative performance.

The online catalogue for Bird Bone Whistler is available at https://www.birdbonewhistler.com/ Catalogue - Bird Bone Whistler · Information about the Origins Centre Exhibition of Bird Bone Whistler

In this dialogue, Prof Christo Doherty, the Chair of Research in the Wits School of Arts, speaks to Dr Sela Adjei, a multidisciplinary artist, researcher and curator from Ghana and a leading proponent of a distinctly African approach to artistic research. Sela has degrees in communication design and African art and culture from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, and received his PhD in African studies from the University of Ghana, Legon. He is currently a lecturer at the University of Media, Arts and Communication in Ghana. He has participated in over 20 exhibitions and curated several high profile exhibitions and art festivals. His latest exhibition, Zadokeli, the Ewe word for eclipse, is a collaboration with the poets Mawuli Adsei and Elikplim Akorli. It opens on the 25th May at the Museum of Science and Technology in Acra. For those of us not able to get to Acra, a number of selected paintings (Black Power Series) complemented bye Elikplim Akorli’s spoken word poetry will form a virtual component of the exhibition in order to reach a wider global audience

Sela’s work as an artistic researcher first came to our attention with a paper he presented at the ARA2020 Conference in Johannesburg. Entitled "The Philosophy of Art in Ewe-Vodu Religion", in his paper he described his engagement with the Ewe-Vodu belief system through a combination of auto-ethnography and his own artistic practice. In the field of artistic research which is so dominated by paradigms developed in the Global North, Sela’s paper was a flash of light from a genuinely African perspective. Not only did Sela’s paper seek to integrate African art, philosophy and indigenous knowledge systems into modern art practices. He also described the spirtual paradigm shift that he went through as a result of his artistic research.

In this conversation, we explore Sela’s journey as an artist and researcher, and examine the challenge of engaging with forms of esoteric knowledge in Africa that do not reveal themselves to outsiders. We also look at the impact the American/Black Lives Matter and the endSARS protests in Nigeria on Sela’s work and how this manifests in his latest collaborative exhibition, Zadokeli.

In this dialogue Prof Christo Doherty of ARA speaks to Jayne Batzofin, the digital archivist on the Reimagining Tragedy from African and the Global South (RETAGS) project. This performance-as-research project is being led by Prof. Mark Fleishman with Mandla Mbothwe in the Centre for Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies at University of Cape Town. The project seeks to create space for an extended interrogation of the vast body of tragic works produced in the theatres of Africa, using performance methodologies as analytical tools to gain purchase on the complex realities of the colonial aftermath. It does this by investigating current events in the postcolony beyond the theatre, through the “prism of tragedy”.

Of particular relevance to the theme of this podcast, the RETAGS project endeavours to challenge the Eurocentric biases and preconceptions of Theatre Studies in two respects: firstly by shifting the perspective to Africa and the Global South thereby challenging the assumptions that align with what has been the predominant perspective in Theatre Studies; and secondly, by engaging in art practice as a mode of research in a central way alongside other more conventional research modes and methods challenging its predominant methodologies.

Jayne Batzofin’s work as the digital archivist on the RETAGS project has been crucial to documenting and making available the rehearsal and development processes in the project. In other words treating the entire process as a mode of research. In this podcast we discuss the challenges of undertaking the documentation, including the ethical and IP issues that have arisen when recording both rehearsals and performances and the scrupulously careful approach that Jayne has taken towards this work. We also examine the larger implications of the digital archiving process and whether or not it could be understood as a resistance to or extension of the ever expanding digital surveillance state. Finally we look at the vast amount of material that gets generated through digital documentation, and Jayne’s views on the potential of AI for dealing with this problem. For links to the digital archive and to more information about this important project, please visit at the RETAGS website.