We are delighted to announce that applications are now open for a fully funded 12-day research and practice-led programme of workshops, discussions, and encounters with historical archives and contemporary practice in July 2027.
Hosted by the UK-SA Bilateral Chair in Culture and Technics, this 12-day workshop is grounded by the theme, Solidarities, and will take place from 5–16 July at the CHR’s Iyatsiba Lab. The programme is open for graduate students (MFA or PhD) based in the UK, South Africa, and Yale University in art or art history. It is fully funded and all travel and accommodation costs are covered.
About
Solidarities asks us to take a long view, to understand alignment and action through locally rooted practice and broader histories of colonialism, apartheid and local and global resistance. In asking how we might envision other futures, it zooms into modes and processes of making – art, design and history. The programme will involve conversations, workshops and visits with artists, grass-roots organisations, thinkers and scholars working in Cape Town and surrounding regions. We will grapple with how histories of land, unfree labour, neo-colonialism and legacies of violence undergird practices that create and sustain resistance and hope.
More broadly, it pushes us to understand our role as responsible artists, makers and scholars alive to the challenges of a complex and shifting world.
The Cape Town Workshop offers the opportunity for graduate students in art history and art practice to learn from and work with each other in a rooted, place-based environment. Thinking and learning with practices such as puppetry, beading and ceramics, will allow us to understand the social, historical and sometimes cosmological dimensions of material practices. It is an opportunity for graduate students based in the UK, South Africa and Yale to connect with each other as peers and with members of South Africa’s arts communities.
The emphasis of the Cape Town Workshop is on creative and collaborative forms of analysis and exchange between participants, who will form a research cohort around the intellectual, practical and political concerns of the year’s theme. Accordingly, participants will be encouraged to share their own areas of interest in the topic and to collectively develop interdisciplinary research methodologies. The cohort will be supported to work together towards future projects around the ideas that emerge from the programme.
To enable the outcome to take place after the intensive programme in Cape Town, participants will be invited to apply for a Collaborative Research Development Bursary. Outcomes of these bursaries will include opportunities to collaborate with the Paul Mellon Centre’s (PMC) staff in London. Further details of the bursaries will be shared with successful applicants.
The Cape Town Workshop is led by Sria Chatterjee and Sarah Victoria Turner (PMC), Nontsikelelo Mutiti and Edward Cooke (Yale University) and Premesh Lalu (University of the Western Cape).
It is convened through a partnership between the PMC and the Iyatsiba Lab of the CHR, UWC, and hosted by the UK-SA Chair in Culture and Technics.
How to Apply: Open Call: The Cape Town Workshop
Applications for The Cape Town Workshop open on 2 November 2026. Please complete the online form by midnight GMT on 1 December 2026. If you have any questions, or require an alternative application format, please contact Calum, cbayne@paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk.
The Cape Town Workshop 2027: Application Form – Fill in form