UJ FADA Faculty Brochure 2022

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Visual Identities in
Art and Design (VIAD)
Established in 2007, the Visual Identities in Art and Design
Research Centre (VIAD) is an interdisciplinary research
centre based within the Faculty of Art, Design and
Architecture, University of Johannesburg. VIAD supports
an international community of Visiting Professors,
Research Associates and Postdoctoral Fellows, whose
diverse research projects promote critical thinking (and
feeling) around African and African diasporic histories,
identities and creative human practices. Reflecting its
commitment to practice-led research, VIAD facilitates
a dynamic programme of exhibitions, publications and
interdisciplinary platforms, presented in collaboration
with local and international partners.
TheParisAlbums1900. Installation view from the exhibition BlackChronicles IV (Curated by Renée Mussai of Autograph ABP, London),
FADA Gallery, April-May 2018. Courtesy of the Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Photo by Anthea Pokroy.
Building on the centre’s focus to date on identity
construction through forms of visual practice, visual
culture and visual representation, projects supported
from 2020-22 will contribute toward a critical
rethinking of history-making and future-imagining
within the historical paradigm (and contemporary
afterlives) of racial slavery, colonial modernity and
apartheid. Central to this focal area is how cultural and
aesthetic practices are enacted as ‘living histories’ and
‘imaginings of the new’ within contexts of racialised,
gendered and sexualised violence, and how such
practices open to new ways of thinking about freedom,
community and what it means to be human.
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