
Art Deco Africa Research Group
Newly established research group, The Art Deco Workparty has begun a series of site visits to explore the presence of Art Deco architecture in Africa. The collective of architects, artists and writers includes: Pamila Gupta, Ivan Vladislavić, Noëleen Murray, Jonathan Cane, Ruth Sacks, Johan Lagae, Alexander Opper.
Wits City Institute Seminar
Wits City Institute Researcher Mpho Matsipa discussed the African Mobilities exhibition (23 April – 19 August 2018) at the Architekturmuseum at TU München. The exhibition revolved around seven pedagogical platforms across 7 cities in Africa and the diaspora, with a final platform in Munich on 26 April 2018.
Wits City Institute Seminar Report
Wits City Institute Postdoctoral Fellow Jill Weintroub reports on her Life in the City research project at the first Wits City Institute seminar of 2018. Weintroub’s project, provisionally titled JoziQuest, seeks to build a digital mapping site aimed at making visible the spatial histories and cultural memories attached to sites in Johannesburg, selected for their links to Hermann Kallenbach and Mohandas Gandhi.
Inaugural Lecture
Andrew W. Mellon Chair of Critical Architecture and Urbanism and Wits City Institute Director Noëleen Murray delivered her inaugural lecture presenting her intellectual interests in the role, place and disciplinary histories of Johannesburg through her current research project ‘The New South’.
Wits City Institute Seminar
Wits City Institute Fellows Bianca van Heerden, Morgen Zivhave, Brittany Birberick and Dumisa Dlamini presented research at a seminar convened by Wits City Institute Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow Jonathan Cane. The presentations provoked compelling and relevant questions about Gauteng.
Wits City Institute / JIAS Seminar and Exhibition
Wits City Institute Honorary Research Fellow Melissa Myambo convened a seminar to bring scholars from the humanities and spatial disciplines into conversation with urban developers and local government officials to address issues related to the City of Johannesburg’s historically-conditioned spatial politics.
Wits City Institute Public Lecture
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Chair of Critical Architecture and Urbanism and Director of the Wits City Institute Professor Noëleen Murray hosted ‘City Dialogues’, a presentation by former Washington DC Mayor Anthony Williams, in conjunction with the United States Consul General Christopher Rowan.
Eleventh Global Studies Conference
Life in the City and Wits City Institute Postdoctoral Fellow Jill Weintroub presented Making Maps: The Possibilities and Pitfalls of Digital Mapping for Spatial and Social Justice, a paper based on her JoziQuest project, at the Eleventh Global Studies Conference Subjectivities of Globalisation in Granada, Spain.
Publication
Andrew W. Mellon Chair of Critical Architecture and Urbanism and Wits City Institute Director Noëleen Murray, in collaboration with the Director of the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study, Peter Vale, co-edited The Politics of Urban Life: Social Activism and the City of Johannesburg, a publication arising from the Performative Urbanisms and the City of Johannesburg workshop.
Fellows Exhibition
Mellon Architecture, Urbanism and the Humanities Master’s Fellow Bianca van Heerden’s exhibition Home after Eviction: A Photographic Essay of Munsieville, Extracts from the Collection Still/Life, was hosted by the Wits City Institute and presented at the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa, University of the Witwatersrand.
Wits City Institute Student Exhibition
Wits City Institute Mellon Architecture, Urbanism and the Humanities Master’s Fellow Nocebo Bucibo’s exhibition iHostela Ngeliny’iKhaya, Regarding Photography as a Just Image opened at the Workers Museum in Newtown, Johannesburg, as part of the fulfillment of her Master of Arts in Fine Arts in the Wits School of Arts.
Exhibition
Wits City Institute Honorary Research Fellow Steven Sack launched an innovative virtual reality exhibition making use of cutting-edge technology to ask questions about human origins. The show is located at the Tshimologong Precinct and at the Origins Centre, both at the University of the Witwatersrand.
Thesis 11 Special Issue
Peformative Jozi, a Special Issue of the journal Thesis Eleven: Critical Theory and Historical Sociology, is guest edited by Andrew W. Mellon Chair of Critical Architecture and Urbanism and Wits City Institute Director Noëleen Murray in collaboration with Peter Vale, Director of the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study.
Exhibition and Conference
The Wits City Institute partnered with the University of Namibia, the Museums Association of Namibia, and the Municipality of Usakos to present Photographs beyond Ruins as part of the international conference ‘Circulations’: the (un)making of Southern Africa beyond and across borders.
Co-Hosted Workshop
Wits City Institute Director Noëleen Murray chaired the Performative Urbanisms workshop with Peter Vale of the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study, with contributions from Visiting Scholars Peter Beilharz of Curtin University, Perth, Trevor Hogan and Julian Potter from the Thesis Eleven Centre, La Trobe University, and Sian Supski of Monash University.
Wits City Institute Seminar
Phindezwa Mnyaka presented ‘The Profane and the Prophetic at a South African beach’ at the Wits City Institute’s Seminar Series. Her paper proposed a reading of photographs by Joseph Denfield and Daniel Morolong through the lens of circular time that sees images as potentially recalling the past while prefiguring the future.
Wits City Institute Master Class
The Andrew W. Mellon Chair in Critical Architecture and Urbanism and Director of the Wits City Institute Professor Noëleen Murray co-hosted the Harvard School of Design’s Professor Toni L. Griffin to a masterclass convened to review and critique the City of Joburg’s Corridors of Freedom initiative.
Conference
The African Studies Association and the American Anthropological Association hosted the second Africa in the World joint conference in Johannesburg in partnership with the Wits City Institute, the journal Anthropology Southern Africa, the Thabo Mbeki African Leadership Institute, and the University of Pretoria’s Department of Political Sciences.
Wits City Institute Workshop
Social Practice in Architecture, Museums, and the Arts was jointly convened by Wits City Institute and Wenner-Gren Doctoral Fellow Njabulo Chipangura in collaboration with Wits City Institute Honorary Research Fellow Steven Sack to explore the representations of inequality and social practices of inclusion
Wits City Institute Doctoral Presentation
Wits City Institute Mellon Architecture, Urbanism and the Humanities Doctoral Fellow Lisa Vetten presented an extract from her doctoral research ‘Governing Rape: The Biopolitics of Sexualized Violence’ at the symposium WellSexuality: Youth and Contemporary Notions of Sexuality in South Africa.
Publication / Book Chapters
Wits University Press and the Society, Work and Development Institute launched Labour Beyond Cosatu: Mapping the Rupture in South Africa’s Labour Landscape edited by Andries Bezuidenhout and Malehoko Tshoaedi. The book surveys the opinions and lifestyles of members of trade unions affiliated to the Congress of South African Trade Unions.
Writing Place, Pushing Genre Curtin University
Andrew W. Mellon Chair of Critical Architecture and Urbanism and Wits City Institute Director Noëleen Murray delivered a public lecture titled Writing Place, Pushing Genre: Adventures across South Africa and Australia to the Sustainability Policy Institute at Curtin University, Perth, Australia.
Screening and Discussion
The Wits City Institute hosted a screening of Ruzza Wazzi’s installation ‘Stitch Me Up’. The immersive video and music production seeks to document Ruzza’s experiences as a migrant living in the liminal space of Hillbrow and to communicate a sense of his personal journey and quest for liberation, a process many migrants are confronted with.