The Faculty of Arts and Design, City Campus, invites proposals for participation in the 2022 edition of its combined Annual Research Conference and Digital Festival . This year, the Faculty collaborates with the South African Visual Arts Historians (SAVAH) to create a larger hybrid festival both in-person and virtual.

We invite proposals from diverse perspectives on this year’s theme:

Romancing the Stone: Contemplating Evolving Trends and Impermeable Places in Arts and Design

The relationship between human beings and stone as a medium, metaphor and artefact has a significant and contested history within the arts. Zimbabwean sculptor Lazarus Takawira notes ‘you look for a stone, and find a story to etch onto the stone … After you are done working on a stone, it will begin talking to you, whispering at you.’ But we also use the word in metaphors to signify impermeable ideas and hardened frameworks. We describe ideas and ideologies as set in stone when we feel that they cannot be changed or shifted. However, as Monet observed in relation to the shifting light on the Rouen Cathedral, ‘Everything changes, even stone.’ Critical theorist Homi Bhabha also reminds us that nothing, least of all culture, is changeless. On this premise of change and chance, the 2022 Arts Research Kaleidoscope – a history-subverting, paradigm-contesting, kaleidoscopic spaceship – invites postgraduate students, researchers and creative practitioners from different disciplines to present and explore various apparently stratified frameworks in their fields from a multidisciplinary perspective.

Submissions may align with, but are not limited to these sub-themes:

A. Art, Design and Creative Innovations

• Perspectives on Art, Innovation and Technology
• Creative Innovations in a Post-Covid World
• Design Thinking and Interdisciplinarity
• Re-thinking Strategies for Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants
• Art and Artists’ Internationalization in Global Crises

B. Evolving Trends in Drama, Visual Studies, Communication and Technology

• Innovations in Video Technology
• Theatre and Interventions in Global Crises
• Evolving trends in Visual Communication and Technology
• Inter/Multidisciplinarity in Productions
• Issues in Film, Media and Content Studies

C. Hard Places in Research, Media Communication and Art History

• Locating Changes in the De-facto Language of the Past and the Present
• The Notion of Otherness, Cohesion and Xenophobic Tensions
• Innovations in Education and Practice-based/Practice-led Research
• Gendered, Racialised and Binary Identities
• History, Repatriation, Fetishization and Decolonization of Art and Artefacts

D. Lithic Ecologies & Hard Places in South African Visual Culture

• Art and Artefact; Heritage, History, Fetishisation, Decolonisation, Landscape and Museum Studies
• Cultural Imperialism and Fetishisation: Identity and Decolonisation
• Gendered, Racialised and Binary Identities; Posthumanisms and Zoopoesis
• Film, Media and Content Studies: Romancing the Stone

E. Art, Design, Creative Innovation, Technology and Entrepreneurship Participants may explore:

• Stone as a Medium
• Stone as a Metaphor
• Stone as an Artefact

Note: ALL presenters and exhibitors will receive a certificate of participation. Awards in different categories will also be given to eligible participants.

For more information on the SAVAH call, CLICK HERE
For more information on DUT 2021 combined event, CLICK HERE
For queries about in-person participation, email KehindeA@dut.ac.za
For queries about virtual/ online participation, email JodieD@dut.ac.za