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Symposium: Other Views. Art History in (South) Africa and the Global South

AVAH – South African Visual Arts Historians, in association with the International Committee of the History of Art (CIHA), addresses in this symposium concerns about the unequal distribution of resources around the globe and challenges from postcolonial societies to the older methods and concepts of Western art history. These challenges have relevance in South Africa, Africa and the Global South, which in this context is a cultural construct rather than a geographic term. It refers to communities and artistic production, throughout history and across nations, which, within the dominant narratives of Western art, have been ignored, marginalised, displaced and appropriated.

A principal focus of the symposium is how the study of art from the African continent is often impeded by a totalising notion of an undifferentiated ‘Africa’. But the colloquium is not confined to African art; such totalising notions also pertain to other countries and regions in the Global South. The importance of the colloquium is that it is positioned in Africa. The aim is to shift the centre of discourse and challenge received systems of thought, which are still largely positioned within Western-centred logic. The desired outcome is to complicate the history of art and the relationship between histories in the Global South and the ‘North’ or ‘West’.