Art effects: sensory education in uncertain times, by Premesh Lalu

Premesh Lalu will be delivering a lecture, ‘Art effects: sensory education in uncertain times’, at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) on Tuesday 31 March 2026, as part of the Ties That Bind Us series and the Pauwels Academy of Critical Thinking.

This lecture revisits conversations with VUB Vice Chancellor, Caroline Pauwels on the enduring aftermaths of the global solidarity movement against apartheid during her visit to the University of the Western Cape (UWC) in 2018. Those exchanges resonate today through an extraordinary arts intervention on climate change enacted with a herd of life-size animal puppets marching from Kinshasa to the Arctic Circle. Created by the Ukwanda Puppet and Design Art Collective in UWC’s Centre for Humanities Research, for Nisar Zouabi and David Lan’s Walk Production, The Herds compels us to rethink solidarity in our era. To this end, it builds on a postcolonial poetics of “voicing a structure” that can be discerned in the response of Irish poets to the 1985 hanging of South African poet Benjamin Moloise.