October 10, 2025
My history of madness in the Belgian Congo will rely on tracking transactional, micro, and urgent documents as gestures. These promise to open “spheres of ethos,” with human riddles, forms of upheaval, and violence (Agamben 1992).
October 10, 2025
Contemporary Black female artists have reclaimed the everyday labor and domestic motions women have historically performed, as artistic gestures in their own right. For example, the ceramic and bronze sculptures of the African-American artist Simone Leigh have referenced vernacular processes like washing chores and needlework.
September 9, 2025
Updated 09 September 2025
July 20, 2025
The 2025 International Workshop on Visual History & Theory will take place between October 14-15. It takes as its starting point the notion of gesture, which operates across a range of literal and conceptual levels.
September 10, 2024
The 2024 Visual History and Theory Workshop will take place on 19-20 September at the CHR’s Iyatsiba Lab.
September 10, 2024
This year’s Visual History and Theory Workshop Keynote will be delivered by Christopher Morton, Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.
June 10, 2024
Abstracts are invited for participation in the annual workshop in Visual History & Theory to be held at the Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape, on 19-20 September 2024.
July 19, 2023
This year’s NRF SARChI Chair in Visual History and Theory Workshop will take place between 27-28 July. It coalesces around the title, ‘Power: Remaking selves, archives, environments’, and will include a keynote by Leigh Raiford who is Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies, University of California, Berkeley.
August 12, 2022
Workshop in Visual History & Theory 2022
July 13, 2022
Premesh Lalu’s documentary film, The Double Future’s of Athlone, which was sold out at the Encounters documentary film festival in Cape Town and Johannesburg, will be screened online at the Durban International Film Festival from July 21-30, 2022.
July 12, 2022
The African Critical Inquiry Programme (ACIP) is pleased to announce that the 2023 ACIP Workshop will be Archiving Otherwise: Sound Thinking and Sonic Practice.
July 12, 2022
The CHR warmly congratulates recipients of the 2022 Ivan Karp Doctoral Research Awards, namely Vanessa Chen, Min’enhle Ncube and Suzana Sousa.