PUBLICATION: Restless Infections
Restless Infections is a collection of new critical essays that analyse seminal artistic engagements with place-making and the politics of space. Writers interrogate site-specific performances, demonstrations and immersive installations curated for city and township spaces, as well as impromptu interventions, films, online works, exhibitions and street photography.
Table of contents for the book”
- Introduction
Jay Pather, Catherine Boulle & Nkgopoleng Moloi
- Part 1 - The Restless City
1 On Art, Contagion and Immunity
Sarah Nuttall
2 Recalcitrant aesthetics, memory and modernity in the postcolonial/postapartheid city Mbongeni Mtshali
3 Habashwe! On the precarity of Black death and survival
Amogelang Maledu
- Part 2 - Public Art for Multiple Publics
4 Intimate and irreducible encounters
Leila Anderson
5 Unpredictable Publics and Anxious Audiences: From Anomie to Agonism in Provocative Public Art
Rike Sitas
6 iRhanga as Public Space: Transposed and as Source for Public Encounter
Khanyisile Mbongwa
- Part 3 - Land, Home, Belonging
7 Haroon Gunn-Salie’s Cartographies of Refusal
Nicole Sarmiento
8 The Rusting Diamond
Meghna Singh
9 Seeing the strange place: African street photography as placemaking
Sinazo Chiya
Contributors Bios
Sarah Nuttall
Sarah Nuttall is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies, and Director of WiSER (Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research) in Johannesburg, South Africa. She is the author of Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections on Post apartheid, editor of Beautiful/Ugly: African and Diaspora Aesthetics, and co-editor of many books including Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa; Senses of Culture; and Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis. She has given more than 30 keynote addresses around the world and published more than 60 journal articles and book chapters. Her work is widely cited across many disciplines.
Mbongeni Mtshali
Mbongeni Mtshali is a Fulbright Scholar and completed his PhD in Performance Studies at Northwestern University. His work focuses on black queer/femme performance in Africa and the diaspora, especially as it challenges nationalist frameworks of African respectability and nationally sanctioned performance repertoires. He teaches in the Centre for Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies at the University of Cape Town, and is creative director of The Shortened Tongue Contemporary Art+Lab.
Amogelang Maledu
Amogelang Maledu is an interdisciplinary art practitioner who developed her critical theoretical background in visual and cultural studies by creating a specific link with art criticism and archival research. Her research interests include (re)reading archives and colonial collections in contemporaneous ways.
Leila Anderson
Leila Anderson (b. Cape Town 1984) is a curator and performance maker working between Belgium and South Africa. She holds a Masters degree from DasTheatre [NL] and is a guest lecturer in the Centre for Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies (UCT). She is a co-founder of Borderlands Public Arts Project (2017– ) and her work focuses on creating and curating site-specific experiences in public space.
Rike Sitas
Straddling the academic world of urban studies and creative practice, Rike Sitas is fascinated by the intersection of art, culture and heritage in urban life. Her research has explored affective urbanisms by looking at the role public-facing art can play in producing knowledge about, and action in realising more just cities. A large part of her research focus has meant unpacking the notions of public space and public life in Southern cityness.
Khanyisile Mbongwa
Khanyisile Mbongwa is a Cape Town-based independent curator who works with public space, interdisciplinary and performative practices, unpacking the socio-political, socio-economic, socio-racial and historical-contemporary complexities and nuances of the everyday. Currently, she works with Norval Foundation as Adjunct Curator for Perfomative Practices and with Cape Town Carnival as Curatorial and Socio-Critical Development advisor. Mbongwa is the Chief Curator of the Stellenbosch Triennale.
Nicole Sarmiento
Nicole Sarmiento is an artist, cultural worker, occasional curator and parent. She completed her PhD at Durban University of Technology in Visual and Performing Art and her research interests and work can be found at the intersection of the arts, ecology, spatial studies, history and unschooling, towards speculative futures of care, relationship and repair.
Meghna Singh
Meghna Singh is a visual artist and a researcher with a doctoral degree in visual anthropology, focusing on the theme of migration, from the University of Cape Town. Working with the mediums of video and installation, blurring boundaries between documentary and fiction, she creates immersive environments highlighting issues of ‘humanism’. She has exhibited widely around the world, published essays, presented papers and given talks on the theme of visual methodologies to explore migration.
Sinazo Chiya
Sinazo Chiya (born 1993, Durban; lives in Cape Town) completed studies in English Literature, Art History, Journalism and Curatorship at the University currently known as Rhodes and UCT respectively. She has contributed to the Centre for Curating the Archive as well as the publications ArtThrob, Art Africa and Adjective. She commenced duties at Stevenson in 2016 and has published 9 More Weeks, a book of artist-interviews under that organisation.
Jay Pather
Jay Pather is a choreographer, curator, teacher and writer. He is Professor at the University of Cape Town where he directs the interdisciplinary Institute for Creative Arts (ICA). He curates the Infecting the City Festival; the ICA Live Art Festival, the Afrovibes Festival (the Netherlands); co-curated for Africa 20/21 Season (France); Spier Light Art (Cape Town), and the Spielart Festival (Germany). His artistic work deploys site-specific, interdisciplinary and intercultural strategies to frame matters of social justice. Publications include a book he edited, with Catherine Boulle, Acts of Transgression and articles in Theater, Rogue Urbanism and The Routledge Companion to Art in the Public Realm.
Catherine Boulle
Catherine Boulle is an audio maker. Boulle worked as writer and researcher at the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA), University of Cape Town where she researched Live Art in South Africa and produces The ICA Podcast. She co-edited – with Jay Pather – the collection Acts of Transgression: Contemporary Live Art in South Africa (Wits University Press, 2019), which won UCT’s 2021 Meritorious Book Prize, and was shortlisted for the National Institute for the Humanities & Social Sciences Non-fiction Book Award in 2020.
Nkgopoleng Moloi
Nkgopoleng Moloi is a Researcher for the Institute for Creative Arts. The Researcher assists the ICA Director in steering the ICA’s research output, particularly writing and editing original publications, and conducting research that helps to shape and inform ICA events and symposiums. Moloi is responsible for producing The ICA Podcast and disseminating all public-facing material.
The book is in review and is planned for publication in 2024
~ 15 December 2023 ~