University of Johannesburg, 27–31 October 2025
A conference is framed by its location. The day before the AICA congress in Johannesburg began, a number of early arrivals caught a hop-on hop-off open-top tour bus to get a feel for the host city that would frame our meetings over the following days, a place almost none of us had visited previously.
The recorded tour guide was illuminating. Johannesburg, we heard, is a most unlikely place. One of Africa’s great cities but only 200 years old, it is built on a plateau some 1,700m above sea level (athletes come here to train, and just walking uphill from the hotel to the university proved a challenge for many), with no river or source of water and precious few natural resources. All it had was a substantial seam of gold, and that alone had been enough to trigger its meteoric rise. Johannesburg, we kept hearing, was a city of gold: people came to get rich, and those who failed ended up in often extreme poverty. Over the week we had opportunity to see both sides: isolated bonfires on waste ground under the flyovers, the apartheid museum just outside Soweto – and some extremely wealthy homes, cars and people.
The theme of the congress, ‘Reimagining the Global South’, was intended to ‘challenge Eurocentric frameworks’ and ‘reconsider the power dynamics within the global art world’, and the majority of papers did keep to the topic. This meant that there was a good sense of coherence as the same themes, addressed in different ways, kept coming up.
As well as its geographical and thematic frames, a particular framing was given to the conference by the AICA Black Women’s Seminar, sponsored by UNESCO. This seminar formed part of the congress, and provided many of the most interesting sessions and participants. For example, the opening keynote address, by Fadzai Muchemwa, Deputy Director of the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, ‘Unsettling Frames: Gendered Histories and the Politics of Representation in African Art’, set the tone and nicely encapsulated the conference themes. Muchemwa was particularly concerned with the various ways in which art had been framed – colonial or post-colonial, patriarchal or feminist. She gave us a variety of examples of artists who tried to reframe art to ensure better visibility especially for black people and for women. But often the situation was quite complex: progressive independence movements, for example, were often rather conservative in their treatment of women, their iconography typically featuring a heroic male, with behind them a supportive female surrounded by children. As a curator herself, she was particularly interested in the ways that curators frame their exhibits, often placing sculptures on heroic pedestals and ignoring the intimate and everyday. It is worth quoting her conclusion in full:
As we do this work, of curating, writing, questioning, making work, we must ask ourselves again and again: ‘Who is this for? What are we making visible? And what are we still refusing to see?’ In the end, unsettling frames is about responsibility: to the histories we inherit, the artists we engage, and the futures we are shaping through every decision we make. We are still weathering the afterlife of empire and expansionist logics of capital. Still explaining why Black women’s labour matters. Still ‘being difficult’. Still being told to wait. To tone down. To compromise.
She herself curates for ‘ceremony’ rather than spectacle, ‘not for answers but for echoes’. And she ended with a challenge: ‘What would it mean to build practices that make space for what has always lived outside the frame?’
Many of the most interesting subsequent presentations were precisely on this theme of breaking the eurocentric frame by exhibiting unconventional – often domestic – artefacts or focusing on the ritual, the intimate, the embodied. Shonisani Netshia, an artist who grew up in Soweto at the end of apartheid, and was the first black pupil at a previously all-white school, uses doilies as a critique of patriarchy. These crocheted mats were placed under almost any moveable object by her parents’ generation as a sign of respectability. She, however, uses them in the service of a rebellious ‘disrespectability politics’. Bringing the domestic into the public sphere ‘breaks down the elitism of art’. ‘Lived experience is a powerful site of resistance’, and can lead to ‘re-imagining’ or reframing.
Usha Seejarim, a South African artist from Jo’burg, uses domestic objects such as clothes pegs, brooms, serving trays and the soles of steam irons to create remarkable sculptures, often rather bitterly ironic. She, too, celebrates traditionally female occupations as a means of resistance, ‘a generative space for aesthetic inquiry and cultural critique’.
Lindelwa Pepu (Kwazulu Natal) was another speaker to use a domestic task to reframe the narrative of art: for her, traditional African beadwork created by women at home is a powerful symbol of identity that gives African women everyday access to what can be a symbolic or even political language. When Nelson Mandela came out of prison, the particular suit he wore indicated Xhosa identity and royalty. Even creating simple beadwork enables black women to assert their agency and autonomy and thus challenge dominant power structures, as well as being profitable.
Gladys Kalichini, a Zambian film-maker, and one of the more gregarious participants, also celebrates intimate domestic rituals, but at a profound level. She showed a video, Wanditulusa (you have redeemed me) 2025, (one channel of a six screen work), of herself, dressed in white, simply washing, drying and moisturising her hands. The performance took several minutes and achieved a spell-binding degree of intensity. The quiet reframing of a simple act foregrounded the power of the somatic to critique the noisy, superficial rhetoric of capitalist showmanship.
This theme of intimate embodiment was used by a number of contributors to challenge viewers’ perception, to take them out of the security of the familiar framings. Renée Mboya, a film maker from Senegal, spoke of the embodied nature of oral tradition by filming young people severally telling a traditional Muslim story; she plays with the rhythmical, repetitive nature of oral history (and of gossip), and its demand for participation and reciprocity from the audience who are caught up in it. She quoted Tina Campt, who suggests that we listen to the voice of an artwork. All these things emphasise the embodied nature of the response to art, and work against the objective, patriarchal framing that the post-enlightenment West uses to distance itself from artworks and artists.
Rachel de Oliveira (Brazil) argued that art criticism is a world-making tool; it does not describe the world but rather fabricates it. ‘The eurocentric gaze shapes the narratives around art’. Art critics therefore have a duty to embrace pluralism, but in a way that does not frame all art using the standard set of European/American metaphors, reducing it to the same old, no matter how diverse. Rather, paying attention to the ‘intonation’ of a work, to its embodied voice, allows us to encounter the unfamiliar without ‘othering’ it.
Ana Lúcia Beck (Brazil) quoted Proust on Chardin: ‘A ray of sunshine, alighting on the sideboard, resting gaily on a glass of water still nearly full after having quenched someone’s thirst, accentuates … the everyday banality of this unaesthetic sight’. She argued for the importance of valuing everyday banality in resisting colonialism and race- and gender-based prejudice. In contrast to the slave-owner who viewed black people either as exotic specimens or soul-less bodies, artists who depict bodily tenderness (‘cafuné’ in Brazilian Portuguese) are engaged in resistance: ‘being a happy black woman is a revolutionary act’. By contrast, she showed a particularly horrendous painting from 1895, notable for its misuse of religious imagery, Modesto y Brocco’s The Redemption of Cain, which depicted a white child sitting on his mixed-race mother’s knee next to his white father; the child, Christ-like, is blessing his black grand-mother who in turn is apparently praising God that her grandson is white.
Many contributors were concerned with activism in art; the theme of resistance lay behind several of the papers. Emma Bedford, a keynote speaker, introduced a major retrospective of the work of anti-apartheid film maker Sue Williamson about to open at the South African National Gallery in Cape Town, ‘There’s something I need to tell you’. The exhibition title comes from a six-screen video installation ‘in which activist mothers inform their daughters of their political convictions and anti-apartheid activities at a time when it was dangerous to do so’. Bedford reminded us of the direct and uncomfortable links between art and activism in South Africa (and, of course, elsewhere too).
Arkadiusz Poltorak (Poland), the Congress’s resident intellectual, wanted to celebrate the localised involvement of activists in bringing about change. For him, the local can trump the universal. (For example, a brief movement such as ‘Stop the City’ produced long-term outcomes.) He introduced a metaphor drawn from biology, ‘counter-adaptation’, the process whereby weaker biological mechanisms can evolve to match a superior adaptation by another living thing – e.g. the prey adapts to a predator by producing toxins, which enable it to co-exist, although without removing the predator. Crudely, in a world of increasingly powerful billionaires, ordinary people can still fight back, even if the former will continue to exist.
Carolina Goetten de Lima (Brazil) gave a paper on art performances by female rappers from South Africa as an example of cross-cultural activism. (Rap is, she argued, an almost exclusively male genre). However, when de Lima characterised a glossy image of the South African rapper, Nadia Nakai, disporting herself on a luxury yacht as ‘luxury as resistance’, this generated quite a debate as to whether Nakai’s pop-star self-indulgence was resistance or collaboration. De Lima responded by suggesting that, in Brazil, ‘it is the intellectuals who like poverty’.
On the theme of cross-cultural influences, Juliette Leeb-du Toit (South Africa) contributed a paper on the influence of Asian visuality on African culture. Some 63,000 slaves were taken from India and Asia to Africa, and she found many traces of Asian culture hidden in African masks and fabrics, for example.
A detailed summary of all the papers presented would be tedious and fail to do justice to often complex arguments, and so I have given here some personal highlights, jackdaw-style, rather than a comprehensive overview. Apologies to those I have not even mentioned. However, there were other delights that should not be overlooked. The irrepressible Jean Bundy from Alaska began her paper on Kentridge, Bosch and Beckmann by apologising for being American at this juncture of history. This may have influenced her claim that ‘Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights appeals to dangerous men’. She spent much of the congress encouraging everyone to write for (and read) the AICA on-line newsletter that she edits.
Joke de Wolf (Netherlands) spoke about the controversial figure of Renzo Martens, who was widely criticised for his 2008 documentary Enjoy Poverty (which claimed to expose how poverty in Africa is exploited by media, though some questioned his means and motive). His contribution to the 2024 Venice biennale, intended to highlight the work of the Congolese Plantation Workers’ Art League, resulted in publicity for himself.
On the other side of the same coin, Bongi Dhlomo-Mautloa was interviewed by Pfunzo Sidogi. She is the curator of a collection of contemporary art by black women which remarkably has been named after her rather than after the financial donor, Michael Javett, a South African millionaire, who wished to avoid being seen as a white saviour giving money to a black woman to buy art by black artists. ‘Undoing patriarchy is undoing the grammar of patriarchy’. The optional congress day excursion on the Friday of the congress included a visit to the Javett Art Centre in Pretoria.
In conclusion, Malgorzata Kazmierczak, AICA International President, summed up the congress by suggesting that art criticism was not just about aesthetics but also very much about politics. The Farewell Party took place at the ‘Studio’ of sculptor Gordon Froud – as wonderful a cabinet of curiosities, occupying two entire houses, as can be imagined.
An optional day trip on the last day took us to the Wits Art Museum (a powerful installation by the Rwandan artist Serge Alain Nitegeka who had filled an entire gallery with a chaos of black timber beams that represented the collapse of his world when forced to flee Rwanda at the time of the genocide, and also the nightmare of obstacles that asylum seekers must navigate in their host country); and to a beautiful and well-stocked sculpture park in Krugersdorp for lunch; the day ended with a visit to the Javett Art Centre and an exhibition tour by Diane Victor – a bitter-sweet tribute to South Africa’s mining past. The following day, a number of us were taken round the Bag Factory, a long-established artists’ studios in Johannesburg, and were to introduced a number of diverse artists, all very articulate about their Muslim, Jewish or Hindu backgrounds.
Particular thanks must go to Karen von Veh, who co-ordinated the whole exhibition and ensured that everything happened seamlessly. Every detail had been thought through, and there were remarkably few glitches. Karen was assisted by Camille Chaumont from the AICA International office in Paris, who saw to the tech and effortlessly herded often reluctant participants into the lecture hall, and on and off buses. Thanks, too, to Richard Gregor, whose hotel room was the scene of nightly parties, where many bottles of wine were equally effortlessly emptied.
Overall, I felt it was an excellent congress, with a good blend of papers, studio and gallery visits, meals and social events, attended by a core of some forty participants. Thanks to South Africa’s affordability, we were all able to stay in the same hotel, which undoubtedly added to the coherence and sociability of the event.
Next year’s congress will be in Rennes, France, (where the AICA archives are housed), 12–18 October 2026, while the 2027 congress is expected to be hosted by Ecuador.
Charles Pickstone
