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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.

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Wits City Institute Seminar

Wits City Institute Andrew W. Mellon Doctoral Fellow Barend BJ Engelbrecht, with Master’s Fellows Refiloe Namise and Michael Cheesman presented papers based on practical and theoretical components of their theses, at the third semester WCI Tea.

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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.

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Wits City Institute Seminar

Wits City Institute Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow Jonathan Cane presented his up-coming chapter ‘Never Modern: High-rise Housing and Race in 1950s Johannesburg’ in The Wits Anthropology Museum.

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Honorary Research Fellow Seminar

Honorary Research Fellow Melissa Tandiwe Myambo presented her seminar ‘Class, xenophobia and xenophilia: Migrant experience in Jo’burg’s diverse Cultural Time Zones’ at the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa on Wednesday 18 April 2018.

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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.

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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’.

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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.

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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.

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Wits City Institute Workshop

In conjunction with the exhibition South Facing by Ângela Ferreira at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, the Wits City Institute convened a workshop on the possibilities and problems of ‘southern’ orientations.

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Security at the Margins Project

Wits City Institute Postdoctoral Fellow Jonathan Cane received a seed grant from Security at the Margins (SeaM) for a pilot research project aiming to use digital humanities to map queer spaces and places in Johannesburg under apartheid.

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Wits City Institute Public Lecture

Wits City Institute Researcher Mpho Matsipa hosted the London-based designer, director, and writer Christopher Lutterodt-Quarcoo at a presentation exploring the provocation that the idea of ‘truth’ is irrelevant.

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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.

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Wits City Institute Seminar

Wits City Institute Visiting Fellow David Morton, Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, presented a special seminar on The ‘City of Reeds’ Debate in Colonial Mozambique, 1962 – 1964.

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Workshop Presentation

Wits City Institute Fellow Abdulwaagied Charles participated in a workshop at the Centre Dürrenmatt in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, initiated as part of a collation of projects established to think anew about the work of the great Swiss playwright, Friedrich Dürrenmatt.

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Wits City Institute Special Lecture

Wits City Institute Honorary Research Fellow Melissa Tandiwe Myambo presented a special seminar in which she discussed her research on the impact of digital technologies in the co-constitution and entanglements of virtual and real cultural worlds.

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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.

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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.

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Wits City Institute Publication

Wits City Institute Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow Jonathan Cane published his web-archive ’60+: Queer, Old Joburg’ in […] Ellipses: Journal of Creative Research. The ongoing research project maps queer lives in Joburg’s inner city during apartheid.

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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.

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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.

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AfroAsia Workshop

Phindezwa Mnyaka presented a Re-Centring AfroAsia workshop reflecting on her ’embryonic’ research focused on musical recordings by the Blue Notes, and meditating on the potential of music to work as theory.

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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.

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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.

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Divided City Initiative Presentation

The Wits City Institute hosted a presentation by Jean Allman, Director of the Center for the Humanities and co-principal researcher on its Divided City Initiative, an Andrew W. Mellon-funded project in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities.

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Maputo Study Tour

In support of the exhibition South Facing by Ângela Ferreira, the Wits City Institute convened a study tour to Maputo, Mozambique. The tour provided an opportunity to visit significant buildings in the city and meet with local experts.

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Wits City Institute Distinguished Visitor

The Wits City Institute in collaboration with the African Centre for Migration and Society hosted a public lecture addressed by visiting Mellon scholar Professor Ayse Caglar from the University of Vienna’s Department of Culture and Social Anthropology.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Re-Centring AfroAsia Conference 2018

Re-Centering AfroAsia: Musical and Human Migrations in the Pre-Colonial Period 700-1500AD is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Hosted at the University of the Witwatersrand, the 2018 conference saw performances, papers and posters.

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Joburg Tours

Life in the City Postdoctoral Fellow Jill Weintroub curated a programme of pre-conference excursions for delegates to the joint North American Anthropology and African Studies Association conference Africa in the World: Shifting Boundaries and Knowledge Production.

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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.

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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

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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.

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Walter Benjamin and Method

Andrew W. Mellon Chair of Critical Architecture and Urbanism and Wits City Institute Director Noëleen Murray delivered a paper to the 4th biennial conference of the International Walter Benjamin Society.

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Conference

Re-Centering AfroAsia: Musical and Human Migrations in the Pre-Colonial Period 700-1500AD is a multi-pronged research, mapping, and archiving project supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The project aims to revolutionise Humanities research in South Africa.

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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.

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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.

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African Critical Inquiry Programme Workshop

The Wits City Institute collaborated with the Wits School of Arts to host the 2017 ACIP Workshop Secret Affinities, A workshop in critical reading and an interrogation of the city in Africa via Walter Benjamin’s Das Passagen-Werk.

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Ângela Ferreira Exhibition

The Wits City Institute hosted Ângela Ferreira’s South Facing at the Johannesburg Art Gallery. Curated by Amy Watson, the exhibition included recent and previously unseen work as well as a commission in response to the Gallery’s controversial Meyer Pienaar extension.

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Faces of the City Seminar

Wits City Institute Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow Jonathan Cane presented an overview of his doctoral thesis Civilising Grass: The Art of the Lawn on the South African Highveld.

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Wits City Institute Performance

Wits City Institute Fellow Tarryn Lee’s Master of Arts by Research in Drama and Film project culminated in the performance piece Beyond the linoleum colon, based on an investigation into how the space of the hospital is shaped by the stories told within its walls.

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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.

© 2024 Noëleen Murray

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