Practices of Entanglement: 2025 South African Visual Arts Historians (SAVAH) Conference.

We are pleased to announce that the 38th Annual South African Visual Arts Historians (SAVAH) Conference will take place in person at the Centre for Visual Arts, University of KwaZulu-Natal (Pietermaritzburg Campus) from 25–27 September 2025. The theme of this year's conference is "Practices of Entanglement".

The term entanglement has been widely used in academic discourse across multiple disciplines – postcolonial studies, anthropology, philosophy, art history, physics and beyond. It often refers to the complexity of relationships between histories, cultures, and identities, with Karen Barad extending these ideas to apply to what she calls agential realism, where concepts of entanglement (or intra-action) describe how entities emerge through relationships with other entities, challenging traditional distinctions between subject/object, human/nonhuman.

The 2025 SAVAH conference aims to pull at these entangled threads and connections in order to begin an untangling that might reveal the richness of the layers in between.
In the spirit of creative curiosity, we ask that submissions focus on the many possible questions rather than the conclusions. We welcome provisional research in progress and hope that the conference will be a platform for knowledge sharing and exchange. Practice-led research is particularly welcome. We also invite papers and visual presentations from scholars, researchers, and post‐graduate students that think through some of these webs across disciplines, and are interested in novel research of any kind that extends beyond the themes outlined below.

Potential topics could include, but are not limited to:

- Visual and Verbal Entanglements: Language, Image, and Knowledge Production
- Postcolonial and Decolonial Art Histories
- Materiality and Entangled Objects
- Entangled Histories and Temporalities
- Materiality and the Making of Entanglements
- Entangled Objects, Archives, and Memory
- Decolonial Entanglements and the Politics of Space
- Curatorial Entanglements: Exhibitions, Practice, and Knowledge Sharing
- Entangled Performances of Self and Society
- Other Novel Research and Experimental Approaches to Entanglement

Submission guidelines:

Please submit your abstract of between 300 and 400 words via savah.org.za/form/submit-abstract-2025 (Annual Conference > Submit Abstract) by Wednesday, 30 April 2025. The Call for Papers can be downloaded from the savah.org.za website. For any queries please contact conferencesavah.org.za.