The Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre (VIAD) is housed within the University of Johannesburg’s (UJ) Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture (FADA). VIAD supports an international community of Visiting Professors, Research Associates, Affiliated Researchers and Postdoctoral Fellows, whose diverse research projects promote critical thinking (and feeling) around two core thematic currents in relation to visual practice, representation and culture, art and design practices:

1.African and African diasporic histories, identities, and creative human practices.

2.Practice-based engagements exploring connections between art, design, and the life sciences.

OVERARCHING THEMATIC

Taking its cue from emergent, transforming, and evolving conceptions of individual and collective South African identities, as well as broader manifestations of politicised socio-economic-cultural individual and collective identity constructs, work done under VIAD’s auspices explores ways in which identities are visually conceptualised, imagined, expressed, performed, disseminated, received, and ‘consumed’. These core thematics are focused on how, through multiple forms of art and design practice, the visual domain functions as an arena through which shifting notions of identity may be articulated, negotiated, and produced in relation to temporal, geographic, socio-economic, and political contexts. While emphasis is placed on the construction of visual identities in a contemporary South African context, this context is considered in relation to its positioning as part of the African continent and a broader diasporic framework.

Research undertaken under VIAD’s auspices is aligned with the expanded socio-cultural-theoretical parameters of art, design, and visual culture, and actively engages with and reflects these visual disciplines as they span the broader spectrum of visual representation. Although readings of identity constructs from a range of interdisciplinary theoretical fields across the Humanities are encouraged and actively sought, emphasis is placed on how these fields can be drawn on in application to visual practice and representation.

BACKGROUND AND CONTEXT

Established in June 2007, VIAD is an established, internationally, and locally recognised research facility. VIAD’s location within the urban metropolis of Johannesburg – the economic capital of Africa – is strategic. In correlation with UJ’s vision to be "an international University of choice, anchored in Africa, dynamically shaping the future" (University of Johannesburg 2017),[1] research conducted in VIAD reflects UJ's engagement with the vibrancy and diversity of the Johannesburg metropolis, as well as the institution’s active nurturing of cultural and social diversity. Furthermore, VIAD’s currently developing research current, which focuses on the intersection of art, design and biotechnologies, is strongly aligned with UJ’s drive towards GES 4.0, and opens up significant potential for transdisciplinary and collaborative research into the economic, social, political and humanist ramifications of the 4IR.

Given its commitment to practice-led research in visual practice, representation and culture, and its purposeful interlinking of textual, interactive, and creative outputs, VIAD has little precedent in the South African academy; a strong point of differentiation is that it fosters critical and dialogical relationships between theory and practice, advancing a theoretically discursive research practice in combination with a practice-led approach to creative production. Research produced in VIAD may take the form of written outputs (solo or co-authored scholarly books, academic journal articles, chapters in edited volumes, guest-edited special editions of journals); creative production (exhibitions, installations, public art, collaborative projects, designed products and visual artefacts); curatorial practices; and multiple platforms for knowledge dissemination and engagement (panel discussions, workshops, conversations, activations, online platforms).

Source cited:

[1] University of Johannesburg. 2017. About University of Johannesburg. [O]. Available: https://www.uj.ac.za/about

AIMS & OBJECTIVES

- Identifying fresh, dynamic, and/or under-developed areas of relevant research relating to identity construction in all the visual- art, design, and culture disciplines.

- Promoting research that consciously links theory and practice, as a source of creative and generative knowledge development.

- Crossing traditional boundaries regarding engaging with these disciplines, by promoting engagement that is both trans- and interdisciplinary, yet situates the visual at its core.

- Generating trans-disciplinary production through textual, creative and/or curatorial outputs by artists, designers, theorists, thinkers, and creative practitioners.

- Producing high-level research that significantly contributes to knowledge generation in the domain of visual identities.

- Developing and broadening a culture of critical enquiry and creativity in relation to Johannesburg, South Africa, the continent, and other Afrodiasporic contexts.

- Fostering dynamic research that comes out of and speaks to the continent with relevance and urgency.

- Expanding dynamic, constructive, and innovative links with other cultural producers and theorists on the continent and other Afrodiasporic contexts.

- Working with partners who share and add value to our vision and who can assist in its realisation.

RESEARCH FOCI 2018-2024

Considering the ongoing political and student activism in South Africa, and related academic and artistic engagements around questions of decolonisation, as well as the emergence of discourses about human relationships to the environment in the post-humanities, VIAD’s research objectives for the period 2018-2024 are relevant and timely. Extending the overarching thematic of the Centre (as outlined above), particular attention is being paid to work that relates to the following two research currents:

Research current 1: ‘Living histories’ and ‘imaginings of the new’: freedom, community, sovereignty, and being human in African and African diasporic visual representation.

Building on the Centre’s initial focus on identity construction through forms of visual practice, visual culture and visual representation, projects supported from 2018-2024 contribute toward a critical rethinking of history-making and future-imagining within the historical paradigm (and contemporary afterlives) of racial slavery, colonial modernity, and apartheid. Central to this focal area is how cultural and aesthetic practices are enacted as ‘living histories’ and ‘imaginings of the new’ within contexts of racialised, gendered and sexualised violence, and how such practices open to new ways of thinking about freedom, community, sovereignty, and what it means to be human.

Research current 2: At the interface: ‘intra-actions’ between art, design and the life-sciences (presently in incubation stages)

This new, developing a research programme is focused on theoretical and practical interactions between the life sciences, biotechnology, visual art and design. Working under the umbrella term ‘bio art/design’ artists and designers engage with scientific processes, using so-called living matter as media. Biological materials such as cells, tissues, organisms, bacteria, yeasts and fungi are explored using a combination of artmaking/design processes and scientific procedures, protocols, and tools. Given this, bioart/design may be considered as a form of interdisciplinary praxis: a critical and creative visual response to the development and presence of biotechnologies and related procedures, and theoretical debates currently taking place in contemporary scientific and popular-scientific discourses, as well as in cultural imaginaries. Practical work takes place in a custom-built, PC2 laboratory, that forms part of the FADA FABLAB. It is the first bioart/design research laboratory of its kind in South Africa, enabling artists and designers to engage in ‘wet’ biological practices in conjunction with research into related theoretical concerns.

WHO WE ARE

Prof Leora Farber (Director)

BA Fine Art, University of the Witwatersrand, Wits School of Art, 1985

MA Fine Art (cum laude), University of the Witwatersrand

DPhil Visual Art (Creative Production), University of Pretoria, 2013

Mandisa Tshiqi (Administration Coordinator)

NDip in Drama Studies, Durban University of Technology, 2009

BA Hons in Drama & Performance Studies, UKZN, 2012 

Nondumiso Msimanga (Research Coordinator - Radical | Others)

BA Drama, Rhodes University (distinction)

BA Drama (Hons), University of the Witwatersrand

MA Dramatic Arts, University of the Witwatersrand

Brenton Maart (Research Coordinator - Bioart + Design Africa)

B.Sc Biotechnology, Rhodes University

Advanced Diploma in Photography, Market Photography Workshop

M.A. in Fine Art, University of the Witwatersrand

M.Sc. in Biotechnology (cum laude), Rhodes University

Sinead Fletcher (Project Assistant)

BA Fine Art, University of Johannesburg