Ruth Simbao
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 老虎机游戏_pt老虎机-平台*官网, 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 老虎机游戏_pt老虎机-平台*官网’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 老虎机游戏_pt老虎机-平台*官网 Teaching Award as a Teaching Fellow, and was the recipient of the Vice-Chancellor’s Distinguished Research Award at Rhodes 老虎机游戏_pt老虎机-平台*官网 in 2009.
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 global souths, 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.
Recent curatorial projects include Bright Ackwerh: Where de choy dey? at the RAW Spot Gallery (2018), Converge at the RAW Spot Gallery (2018, curated with Brunn Kramer), Consuming Us at the Cape Town Art Fair (2016, curated with Azu Nwagbogu), SLIP: Mbali Khoza and Igshaan Adams (2014), the performance art programme BLIND SPOT at the National Arts Festival (2014) that featured Mohau Modisakeng, Sikhumbuzo Makandula, Mbali Khoza, Igshaan Adams, Joseph Coetzee, Simone Heymans, Chiro Nott and Ivy Kulundu-Gotz, 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).
Simbao has presented her work in South Africa, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Senegal, Ghana, Canada, the USA, France, Jamaica, China, New Zealand and Poland, and her work has been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Danish, Finnish and Mandarin. In 2016 Simbao joined the editorial consortium of the African Arts journal that is associated with UCLA and distributed by MIT Press (https://www.mitpressjournals.org/aa). She founded the PROSPA publishing workshops that take place annually in different African cities (/artsofafrica/programme/publishingworkshops/), and the Residency for Artists and Writers (RAW) programme (/artsofafrica/programme/residenciesforartistsandwriters/
Last Modified: Wed, 09 Jan 2019 14:34:06 SAST