How can art help us learn to live together again in a time of division and uncertainty? In this lecture, South African art historian Premesh Lalu shows how art can be a source of courage and connection. Drawing on a forgotten story about a “chain of voices” that inspired a slave uprising in the Cape Colony two hundred years ago, he reveals how beauty, memory and truth can come together as a force for freedom. Referring to the philosopher and politically engaged thinker Michel Foucault, Lalu connects historical insight with urgent questions about solidarity, justice and the search for human dignity in an unsteady world.
VISU and PACT invites you to join the lecture 'Art effects: sensory education in uncertain times' by prof. Premesh Lalu as part of the Ties That Bind Us series and the Pauwels Academy of Critical Thinking.
In this lecture, South African professor Premesh Lalu explores how art can help us rethink what it means to live together in a world marked by uncertainty and inequality. He speaks about the ties that connect people, but also about the moments when those ties may need to be loosened to make space for something new.
This lecture revisits conversations with Caroline Pauwels on the enduring aftermaths of the global solidarity movement against apartheid on her visit to the University of the Western Cape (UWC). Those exchanges resonate today through an extraordinary arts intervention on climate change enacted with a herd of life-size animal puppets marching from Kinshasa to the Arctic Circle. Created by the Ukwanda Puppet and Design Art Collective in UWC's Centre for Humanities Research, for Nisar Zouabi and David Lan's Walk Production, The Herds compels us to rethink solidarity in our era. To this end, it builds on a postcolonial poetics of "voicing a structure" that can be discerned in the response of Irish poets to the 1985 hanging of South African poet Benjamin Moloise.
About Premesh Lalu
Professor Premesh Lalu is a leading researcher and writer on South African history, post-apartheid studies and arts education. He teaches at the University of the Western Cape, the VUB’s partner university in South Africa, where he founded the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR). He holds the UK-SA Bilateral Chair in Culture and Technics.
Lalu publishes both in international academic journals and in newspapers and online platforms. His books, including Undoing Apartheid (2022), explore themes such as freedom, solidarity and aesthetic education. He is also active in cultural and educational institutions, including the District Six Museum and the Handspring Trust for Puppetry in Education in South Africa. Lalu regularly gives lectures around the world.
This event is made possible thanks to a legacy gift from Ernesta Jansen to the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.
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Art as a protest and pedagogy: the puppetry of Ukwanda
About Ties That Bind Us: transcultural perspectives on social forms
A cross-disciplinary series organised at the Faculty of Languages and Humanities for VUB’s Public Programme
The impact of global and geopolitical crises on European societies is widely felt. Common reactions to these are a growing societal divide and a rise in anti-democratic positions. The public imaginary is rife with a rhetoric dominated by the erection of walls, the demarcation of territory and claims of ownership. Crushed between polarised camps are vulnerable members of our societies – and thus humanity itself. Individuals with their complex identities are categorised into groups whose belonging, right to existence even, is called into question. Understanding the realities of diversity and change as given, the series “Ties that Bind Us” seeks to create a platform for a wide range of perspectives, life experiences and cultures of knowledge about forms of kinship, solidarity and conviviality – or, in other words, a counter-imaginary space to an increasingly widespread, yet dangerously reductive binary thinking.
This event is part of PACT and VISU
The world needs you
This initiative is part of the Pauwels Academy of Critical Thinking (PACT), a lecture programme for everyone who believes that critical thinking and dialogue are an important first step to create impact in the world.
As an Urban Engaged University, VUB aims to be a driver of change in the world. With our academic educational programmes and innovative research, we contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations and to making a difference locally and globally.