What can arise through creative enquiry in the inbetween ‘off-centre’ city of Durban?

Despite the scale of this large port city and the substantial movement of people, capital and goods, Durban occupies a marginalised position in the South African artworld. It is often negatively characterised as a zone of transition that cannot support the careers of professional artists and producers–a place where artists and creative practitioners begin their journeys, or pass through briefly before moving to other, bigger cultural centres. Emerging from the collaborative efforts of the ArtsResearchLab, this exhibition seeks to reframe this in-between condition as a site for productive, creative engagement. Rather than lamenting its just off-centre ‘off-centre’ state (and all that appears to be lacking), this aesthetic presentation of thoughts, propositions, ideas and questions invites consideration of some of the creative benefits of not occupying a fully centered position.

The ArtsResearchLab encourages critical thinking and curious inquiry through the process of making, presenting and engaging with art as a form of research. Everyone has the ‘right to research’, yet access to this right remains confined to the University context. Funded by the National Arts Council, the ArtsResearchLab takes an exploratory, experimental and collaborative approach to producing and sharing knowledge through mentorship and the cultivation of a supportive creative network. Moving beyond the confines of the University as the traditional house of research, this project seeks to make practice-based research knowable and accessible to a broader audience of artists, cultural producers and community members. Working collaboratively as a team of writers, designers, curators, cultural producers and practice-based researchers, the ArtsResearchLab team are generating artworks, written content, media, events and proposals to enable growth in research expertise, in the arts through the KZNSA– with, for and in the city of Durban.

Bringing together the works of exchange students from The University of Arts Bremen (HFK), DUT Masters students and local South African artists, the Inbetween exhibition at the KZNSA showcases completed and in-process pieces developed as part of the ArtsResearchLab project. Emerging through a series of welding, papermaking, screen printing and ceramics workshops facilitated by the DUT, the artworks and installations on display embrace the notion of the inbetween as a space for arrival, departure, transition and connection. In this inbetween space themes of belonging, identity, geography, history, justice, perspective and movement can be contemplated, considered and explored through art-making and practice-based inquiry.