Who we are
The Institute for Creative Arts (ICA), formerly the Gordon Institute for Performing and Creative Arts (GIPCA), is a research institute that facilitates socially responsive and innovative creative practice across the disciplines of music, dance, performance art, literature, fine art, and film. Having established platforms for dynamic live art practice through which various forms of creative thinking and research converge, the ICA generates publications that push traditional boundaries.
It connects artists, activists, public thinkers, and scholars in social and natural sciences. The main aim is to foster transdisciplinary artistic research that is collaborative, disruptive, dialogic, and geared towards social justice. A key premise is that transdisciplinary practice is crucial in understanding contemporary societies and addressing the spatio-temporal complexities of epistemic, economic, and environmental justice. As a research institute, the ICA contributes to progressive pedagogies, mentorship, and knowledge sharing.
ICA Director, Nomusa Makhubu, is a Professor in Art History at the University of Cape Town. She is the founder of Creative Knowledge Resources (CKR) – an open-access platform for social justice arts. Makhubu was the Deputy Dean for Transformation in the Humanities Faculty at the University of Cape Town (2020-2022). She was the recipient of the ABSA L’Atelier Gerard Sekoto Award in 2006 and the Prix du Studio National des Arts Contemporain, Le Fresnoy in 2014. She received the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) African Humanities Program fellowship award and was selected to be an African Studies Association (ASA) Presidential fellow in 2016. In 2017, she was a UCT-Harvard Mandela fellow at the Hutchins Centre for African and African American Research, Harvard University. In 2017 and in 2023, she was the First Runner Up for the Department of Science and Technology (DST) Women in Science Awards. Makhubu has co-curated exhibitions (including a co-curation of the South African Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in Italy), and she has published Creative Books and research papers in peer-reviewed international journals and book volumes.
National Research Foundation Rating: C1
Orcid ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2546-4701
Nobukho Nqaba: Project Coordinator.
Buntu Tyali: Technical Manager.
What we do
The ICA hosts a range of Interdisciplinary Symposia and Conferences which focus on Interdisciplinarity, Decoloniality, and Art Education.
Our Live Art Programme entails initiating new research on live art in South Africa and staging live art performances that emerge from experimentation, sustained research, and innovative concepts. The ICA’s Live Art Festival, run every two years, is the best-known feature of this programme.
Our Public Art Programme brings together research and artistic practice in public spaces, taking the work of artists and academics to a range of communities.
The ICA's Public Lecture Series (including the Great Texts/Big Questions lecture series) offers practitioners, academics, students, and the public an opportunity to interrogate bodies of work that are of interest to the public and issues of critical concern.