How we sense and feel | A Gathering to Reimagine Creative Solidarity.

VIAD Research Centre, University of Johannesburg in partnership with the Simmons Centre, Brown University and the Africa Institute, Global Studies University invites you to “How we sense and feel |A Gathering to Reimagine Creative Solidarity.” We invite makers, artists and art-researchers to consider how they are actively reconstituting the aesthetic in the present time of war. In coming together with artists from the Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Palestine, Lebanon, South Africa, Haiti, Ethiopia and the United States of America, the Imagined New Volume III (or, what happens when History is a Catastrophe?), puts forward the following questions:  What (new) aesthetic knowledges are artists fighting for in the face of catastrophic violence? How are artists remaking worlds from material violence without reproducing this violence? How do artists tell stories of war, grief and hope beyond their identity? And what is the present relationship between art and the political?  Sensing the world is how we make sense of our experiences and the feelings which emerge therein. During war and heightened violent conflict, our perceptual terrain is disrupted; as our very lived world faces an unmaking. Worse still, is that the regime of war attempts to deconstruct what is sensible or reasonable by attacking perception through the senses as well as the social.  Who we are is pulled apart during war, and that relational being is forced to ask who belongs and who does not belong when some are cast as enemies. In that space, what can be done to whom and why is measured by feelings of fear, love, hatred, grief, even hope but it is distorted from any ordinary ways of knowing what it means to live a life. Within this social sphere which knows the world through skewed perceptual frames, some are forced to experience worlds without place while others lay claim to the whole world in its entirety. With the aesthetic realm implicated in all sides of the regime of contemporary warfare, this gathering of artists – who think about conflict through their hands, bodies, natural and built environments – offers a moment for collectively reimagining what creative solidarity can look like today. In Johannesburg, South Africa, at the Pan-Africanist space of The Forge, this assembly acts as an invitation to think collectively through practice. How we make worlds and create new forms of solidarity is what this gathering hopes to imagine anew. How we sense and feel is at stake. Join us to think through (new) creative ways of knowing the world while facing war. This roundtable conversation features artists; Berhanu Ashagrie Deribew, Tibian Bahari, Mark Gibson, Renold Laurent, Patrick Bongoy, Teresa Kutala Firmino, Mai Shaer, Milia Khoury and Shereen Abed. Venue: The Forge, at 87 De Korte Street, Braamfontein, Johannesburg Date: Sunday, 23 August 2026 Time: 17:30–20:00 Please note that while the Forge has ramp access at the entrance, the bathroom does not have ramps. Food served by Bitten Studio Poster image by Teresa Kutala Firmino

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