Image & Text (special section) | Call for papers: The impact of artificial intelligence on art and design

Introduction

In discourse that comments on the impact of AI in the field of art and design, a large number of papers have been published from 2020 onward that highlight various relational issues between AI and the artist, designer and art educators. Specifically, they comment on the impact that AI will and has had on altering the way art and design tasks are executed and whether it will completely augment processes surrounding creativity and ‘creative thinking’....

Reclaiming Our Heritage - Harnessing Educational Pathways for the Return and Restitution of Cultural Property in Southern Africa

 Avi Sooful

The Mazibuyele eAfrica Conference held in Johannesburg from 20-22 January 2025 was an investment by UNESCO, AUDA-NEPAD and the University of Pretoria in a restitution project. Invited stakeholders from Southern African countries, South African government officials, the President of ICOM-Africa, Jean-Paul Koudougou (Burkina Faso), and the Vice-President of ICOM, Terry Nyambe (Zambia),...

Hussein Salim working on a reduction print at the ASAI reduction printmaking workshop, Centre for Visual Arts, University of KwaZulu Natal, February 2025. Photograph by John Robinson.

Africa South Art Initiative (ASAI) has been very active since the end of last year and into the first quarter of 2025, hosting three printmaking and arts writing workshops in Cape Town (University of Cape Town, December 2024), Johannesburg (University of the Witwatersrand, January 2025) and Pietermaritzburg (University of KwaZulu Natal, February 20205). The workshops were made possible through funding...

Minutes of the 27th meeting

Present: Ebenezer Acquah, Juste Constant Onana Amougui, Paul-Henri Souvenir Assako Assako, Patrique deGraft-Yankson, Osuanyi Essel, Stefan Eisenhofer, Mary Claire Kidenda, Runette Kruger, Lydia Muthuma, Jane Otieno, Nicola Pauli, Avi Sooful, Bernadette Van Haute, Ernst...

African Days of Art History - Journées Africaines d’Histoire de l’Art - Conference Report 

Runette Kruger

The inaugural African Days of Art History / Journées Africaines d’Histoire de l’Art conference took place from the 7th to the 9th of April 2025 at the Libre Académie des Beaux-arts (LABA), Douala, Cameroon. EVC Expert Panel member Professor Paul-Henri Assako Assako, Director of LABA, was a core convener of this historic conference with special patronage by CIHA, the Comité International d'Histoire de l'Art....

EVC is cooperating with New Futures for an international residency program in Johannesburg. Over 40 young artists have applied. Due to the high quality of the applicants, the jury found it extremely difficult to make a selection. Finally, five artists from Africa, three from Latin America, three from Asia and two from Europe are now invited to take part in online seminars in April 2025. After that they will travel to Johannesburg for a four-week residency. Their aim is to develop a joint exhibition on the topic of “Mining”. This exhibition will be shown in Johannesburg...

EVC - in cooperation with Co-Making Matters and thx again - has organized a roundtable at the MINOR COSMOPOLITAN INTERVENTION in Berlin on May 8-10, 2025 (Link). The panelists of the session “Art, Culture, Education and Global Contemporaneity – an Exploring Visual Cultures initiative” are discussing EVC’s engagements during and in the aftermath of documenta fifteen, and the insights gained from EVC’s South-South-North collaborations. The roundtable will be structured around the following four topics that are based on recent publications...

The (Un-)told narratives of African museum objects and beyond

Context

The approach of the (Un-)told Stories research project might be described with reference to the Sankofa bird, an Akan symbol denoting “to go back and get it”. The Sankofa bird is often associated with the proverb “Se wo were fi na wosankofa a yenkyi,” which means “It is not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten” (African Tradition, Proverbs, and Sankofa, 2006)....

 Poster of the exhibition: Street scenes with painted sotrama minibuses, Bamako, Mali, 2024, photos © Abdoul Karim Diallo

Merci Maman is an exhibition at the Museum Fünf Kontinente in Munich. It is based on around sixty photographs specially created for it by the Yamarou Collective in Mali (Seydou Camara, Monique Dena, Abdoul Karim Diallo, Sidiki Haidara and Anna N’Diaye)....