New university-wide focus on visual and curatorial practices launched

Next week will see the launch of Arc: The Visual University and its Columbarium, a UCT strategic focus on the archival and curatorial effects and possibilities of visual practices in the generation of knowledge, across all faculties. The occasion will be marked by a cocktail function and a lecture by James Elkins of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Today's university uses a wide range of image-making and image-interpreting practices: doctors, lawyers, scientists of all sorts, engineers, humanists and social scientists all produce images and make arguments about them in different ways. In his talk, Elkins will assess the state of scholarship on links between art and science, arguing that is possible to consider images in various fields without using tropes from the humanities or social sciences as explanatory tools - in other words, by letting the different disciplines speak in their own languages.

He will explore the model of a university-wide course on visual experience, which would act as a corrective to the almost exclusively humanities-based perspective of existing 'visual culture' courses while also acknowledging the visual nature of much of contemporary research and experience, over and against the emphasis in most curricula on words and equations.

A lecturer in the Department of Art History, Theory and Criticism at the Art Institute of Chicago, Elkins' recent books include On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art, Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction, What Happened to Art Criticism? and Master Narratives and their Discontents. He has edited two book series for Routledge and is currently organising a seven-year series called The Stone Summer Theory Institute stonesummertheoryinstitute.org.

The lecture and launch event will take place on Tuesday 23 August at 5pm at UCT's Hiddingh Hall, Hiddingh Campus, 31-37 Orange Street, Gardens, Cape Town. For more information, visit: arc.uct.ac.za.