Prof. Ruth Simbao

National Research Foundation Chair in “Geopolitics and the Arts of Africa” Rhodes University, South Africa

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Ruth SIMBAO is the National Research Foundation SARChI Chair in Geopolitics and the Arts of Africa and a Professor in the Fine Art Department at Rhodes University, South Africa. She runs the Arts of Africa and Global Souths research programme, which comprises the SARChI Chair programme funded by the National Research Foundation, the PROSPA programme (Publishing and Research of the South: Positioning Africa) funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Art POWA network. Simbao received her PhD from Harvard University’s Department of History of Art and Architecture in 2008, and was an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) postdoctoral fellow as part of the Humanities in Africa programme in 2010. In 2002 she received a Harvard University Teaching Award as a Teaching Fellow, and was the recipient of the Vice-Chancellor’s Distinguished Research Award at Rhodes University in 2009.

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Her recent research interests include contemporary art with a particular focus on Africa, the geopolitics of art and society, geopolitics in relation to biennialisation, ‘strategic southernness’ and the global south, theories of ‘place’, contra-flow diasporas, cosmolocalism, redefinitions of ‘the local’, the power of small spaces, modest gestures, faux pas and failures, artists’ responses to xenophobia, Africa–China relations and the arts, contemporary cultural festivals and globalisation, performance theory and site-situational art, a geopolitics of knowledge, sideways learning as a form of decoloniality, and the orientation of discourse.

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Curatorial projects include CONVERGE (2018 with Brunn Kramer), Consuming Us – Special Project at the Cape Town Art Fair (2016 with Azu Nwagbogu), SLIP: Mbali Khoza and Igshaan Adams (2014),the performance art programme BLIND SPOT at the National Arts Festival (2014) that featured four performance projects (Bismillah, Barongwa, Everse, and What difference does it make who is speaking?) and Making Way: Contemporary Art from South Africa and China at the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg (2013) and the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown (2012) (www.makingway.co.za).

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In 2016 Simbao joined the editorial consortium of the African Arts journal that is associated with UCLA and distributed by MIT Press. She has presented her work in South Africa, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Ghana, Canada, Jamaica, Poland, France, New Zealand, Australia and the USA, and her work has been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Danish and Finnish.

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Keynote Speech

When “African Art” Meets “China-Africa”: Space-Time Imaginaries and a Pursuit for New Scripts

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What happens when the dominant discourse of “African art” meets the dominant discourse of “China-Africa”? What are the overlapping dynamics at play in these respective discourses, and what can we learn by comparing the two? Who authors these discourses, and what is the difference between being a knowing subject within a discourse and being an object of a discourse?

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In this presentation I explore space-time imaginaries, and argue that the struggle within Western theory to move beyond dichotomous ways of thinking about space and time has contributed towards various stereotypes within “African art” and the “China-Africa” discourse. Through a discussion of the Making Way exhibition and various artistic practices, I examine the ways in which various artists challenge stereotypes and begin to open up the terrains of Africa and China.

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Framing my research within a contemporary geopolitics of knowledge, I consider the differences between spatialising the “Third World” and enacting “strategic southernness,” which emphasizes agency and self-identification in the contemporary rise of Africa and China. What is the importance of creating new scripts as we strategically reach sideways for southern solidarities that connect the arts in, for example, Asia, Africa and Latin America? How do we rethink value and privilege in relation to the notions of underdeveloped spaces in the arts by considering the perils of over-development? How can our strategies move from a continent-as-object model to an embedded yet radically situational geography, and position the global south at the vanguard of future contemporary art.