Conference Conveners - SAVAH 2026

Ruth Simbao is an author, professor, curator, photographer and filmmaker. She is currently 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 is also a core researcher in the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence, which is a Rhodes collaboration with the University of Lagos (Nigeria), Moi University (Kenya), Joseph Ki-Zerbo University (Burkina Faso), and Bayreuth University (Germany). Simbao founded the RAW Spot Gallery in 2018, the pan-African PROSPA Publishing Workshops in 2016, and Arts Lounge Africa in 2011.She received her PhD from the History of Art and Architecture Department at Harvard University (2008) and was an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Postdoctoral Fellow as part of the Humanities in Africa programme (2010).Simbao was the recipient of the Vice-Chancellor’s Distinguished Research Award at Rhodes University (2009) and received a Harvard University Teaching Award as a Teaching Fellow (2002).

Focusing on the arts of Africa, her research interests include art, activism and social justice; Africa–China and the arts; the intimacies and resistances of Afro-Asian entanglements; ‘strategic southernness’ and global souths; theories of ‘place’ (including contra-flow diasporas and ‘cosmolocalism’); the power of modesty, small spaces and ‘failures’; artists’ responses to Afrophobia; and an alter-geopolitics of knowledge.Her most recent research as a scholar and a creative has been on transoceanic studies and St. Helena Island in the South Atlantic, and somatic relationships between land, burial sites and spirits.

Simbao serves on the Editorial Board of the book series, Afrasia: Contours, Crossings, Connections (Pittsburg University Press), and founded the only Africa-based board for the African Arts journal (MIT Press) consortium (2016 to 2021). Having published in various academic journals (Art Journal, Safundi, African Arts, NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Renjian Thought Review, Something We Africans Got, Critical Interventions, Third Text, Image & Text, Art South Africa, and Parachute: Revue d’Art Contemporain/Contemporary Art), her current focus is on book publishing and film creation.

She is the lead editor of Audacious Art Histories, Grounding the Arts of Africa (in press) and co-editor of Visualising China in Southern Africa: Biography, Circulation, Transgression (2022).

Simbao is currently writing a monograph (Intimacy, Solidarity, Resistance: Art and Visual Culture at the Africa-China Nexus), and creating two feature documentary films set in Zambia and on St. Helena Island.

Head of the Fine Art Department, Dr Anguria is an art historian and researcher with a focus in visibility and its manufacture for Black women in South African art and media.

She has collaborated on a number of wide reaching international projects such as ConnectZA (the creative programme leading to the season of cultural exchange between the UK and South Africa; lead by the British Council), and more recently The Imagined New (a three part research exposition lead by the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice at Brown University, and the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre at the University of Johannesburg).

Anguria co-curated the exhibition Black Sonic Heritage as Heresy (2022), and has had her own work included in several exhibitions such as Degrees of Separation (2014) and Spatial Relations (2015). She also has work included in the Wits Art Museum collection.

Professor Stephen Fọlárànmí is an artist and Associate Professor of Art History in the Fine Arts Department, Rhodes University, South Africa. He received his BA, MFA (Fine Arts specializing in Painting) MPhil and PhD in Art History from Obafemi Awolowo University Ilé-Ifẹ̀ Nigeria. Previously Stephen taught Painting, Drawing and Art History at Obafemi Awolowo University Ilé-Ifẹ̀ from 2002-2020.

His research interests dwell on Yorùbá Art Studies/African mural Art, Architecture, Performance Art and Activism and Public art. His articles have been published in journals, conference proceedings and chapters five in books. As an artist, Stephen has exhibited his works in Nigeria, Germany, London and the USA.

Stephen was a recipient of the first Höffmann-Dozentür für Interkulturelle Kompetenz at University of Vechta, Germany - 2008/2009 session. In 2018 he was NRF/DST SARChI Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Arts of Africa and the Global Souths, Fine Art department Rhodes University.

He is a recipient of the 2019 Getty/College Art Association (CAA) International travel grant, CAA 2020 International Travel grant, and 2020 Art Council of the African Studies Association (ACASA) Travel grant.

Jarrett Erasmus is an Eastern Cape-based artist and educator working across media and social practice through a multi-disciplined approach. His work explores post apartheid realities in South Africa and their effects on social dynamics, spatial aesthetics, and communities, both within South Africa and in various African diasporas.

A member of the Burning Museum collective, he completed a MA in Fine Art at the University of the Witwatersrand in 2017, and in 2016 participated in the Summer School programme at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdk). He is currently doing a PhD at Rhodes University's Fine Art department where he is also employed as the undergraduate coordinator for First Year.

Erasmus has presented his solo work and collaborative projects in a variety of institutional and public contexts, including at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London (2023), Scheepvaartmuseum in Amsterdam (2022), Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town (2019), The Latitudes Art Fair (2019), the African Art Forum in Venice (2017), Kunsthaus in Dresden (2016), the Festival d'Art Urbaine, Antananarivo (2016) and at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2014).

Erasmus remains active in several community art initiatives that were instrumental in facilitating arts education for people of colour under the apartheid regime, and is currently Chairperson of the Thupelo Arts Trust, a foundation dedicated to fostering artistic experimentation and international exchange.

Dr Mbali Khoza is an artist and Art History and Visual Arts Lecturer at Rhodes University whose research interrogates authorial identity in artistic practice by posing the question ‘what difference does it make ‘who’ is speaking?’. Through a critical analysis of post-colonial artist practice, she investigates the ways in which artists use visual language to not only speak but rethink ways of speaking.

Khoza has participated in a number of exhibitions, such as the Gwanza Photography at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe (2011), Rechewed at the Centre of Historical Reenactments (CHR), (2011), Out of Thin Air at the Michael Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town (2012), After After Tears, with CHR at The New Museum, Museum as Hub, New York (2013), Regions A-G, Johannesburg Library (2013), BLINDSPOT at the National Arts Festival, Grahamstown (2014), next thing you know, Blank Gallery, Cape Town (2014), Poetics of Relation, LiveInYourHead, Geneva (2015) and Native of Nowhere, ChurchProjects, Cape Town(2022).

Her PhD research examined the historicity of blackness, black existence and black expressive culture.