Who we are
The Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) is an interdisciplinary institute based in the University of Cape Town’s Humanities Faculty, formerly known as the Gordon Institute for Performing and Creative Arts (GIPCA). Since 2008, the Institute has fostered innovative practice and research in the creative and performing arts that works across the disciplines of music, dance, fine art, drama, literature and film, with a particular focus on black practitioners and issues that affect black South Africans.
The ICA’s main aim is to foster innovative practice and research in the creative and performing arts. The focus on interdisciplinarity emerges from this vision for innovative research and practice. UCT has very strong disciplines, for instance in Fine Art and Drama. The ICA supports these disciplines, and pioneers research and artistic practices that blur disciplinary boundaries.
A key premise of the ICA’s work is that interdisciplinary practice in South Africa, and live art in particular, help us to understand the complexity of our contemporary society – one that is chronologically 'post' apartheid, but that continues to grapple with material redress, land redistribution and systemic racism.
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) – a 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
Amogelang Maledu is the ICA's Project Coordinator.
Buntu Tyali is the ICA's Technical Manager.
What we do
The ICA's MA and PhD Programme in Live Art, Interdisciplinary and Public Art is open to choreograp
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.