This year will see the North-West University (NWU) play host to the 35th annual South African Visual Arts Historians (SAVAH) Conference in September 2020. The event represents a dynamic collaboration between SAVAH and the NWU’s research niche area, Visual Narratives and Creative Outputs (VINCO) in the Faculty of Humanities.
The theme of this year’s conference is: “Untold stories”.
The impact of stories
According to the conference organisers, stories capture the elusiveness of creating and imagining by linking the act of telling with being. Therefore, stories make us, and we make ourselves through the stories we hear and don’t hear, tell and don’t tell. Over millennia and across cultures, stories about particular places, persons, materials, objects or ideas have been told and retold in different ways and from different perspectives. In the process, some narratives have gone unheard, unseen or have even actively been silences.
The year 2020 marks the beginning of a new decade and during the conference the question will be asked how might we re-imagine our collective past and imagine the future through the creation of new stories or the un-telling of old stories?
A call for papers
During the conference participants will engage with the work of various artists, artworks, visual culture and design as practices of storytelling or narrative while constructive ways of understanding, unravelling, and contributing to current discourse on the visual field will take place.
Papers are awaited that explore, inquire and reflect on visual expression and ways of storytelling that work towards acknowledging, understanding, and (re)visualizing narratives. Possible topics include – but are not limited to:
- Tensions between visuality, materiality, orality, and textuality in and through narrative.
- Visual storytelling (such as in artist’s books, graphic novels, cartoons, animation and branding).
- Relating experiences of place and space or situatedness through stories.
- Collaborative storytelling and ways of collectively engaging with or sharing stories.
- Notions of truth and fiction, history and myth in visual storytelling.
- Memory, remembrance, visual narrative and re-story-ation.
- Palimpsests, intertextuality, bricolage and visual layers of narrative.
- Liminality and boundary crossing.
- Surfacing the hidden through storytelling.
- Archives, archival material and subaltern voices.
SAVAH members can also submit papers on current research that engages topics not included in this call for papers. All submissions must reach the organisers by 30 March 2020.
Any questions relating to the conference can be sent to conference@savah.org.za
