Important Dates

The Creative Life of Research: Encounters with African Worlds, a BIGSAS exhibition

explores the creative dimensions of research in African Studies.

The exhibition seeks to establish research as a creative process that calls upon the imagination to trace unexpected connections and illuminate what lies beyond the immediately visible. Through photography, writing, painting, film, sketches, and other artistic forms, researchers share the creative processes that accompany their work, which often remain outside the formal spaces where academic work is presented.

We aim to move, for a moment, beyond the tightly defined boundaries of academic presentation and offer a glimpse into the imaginative, sensory, relational, and experimental dimensions of research work in African Studies. We invite you to join us in reflecting on these complex and creative processes through which knowledge comes into being, and on questions about what it means to produce art on, from, or with Africa, as well as the unequal conditions under which knowledge of African worlds is rendered visible.

The exhibition will be held at the Iwalewa Gallery at FZA, on the university campus, from 28 October to 18 December 2026.

Please join us for the opening

Reception
28 October 6 pm
FZA, room S 145.

A special highlight of the evening will be an exclusive, one-time screening of three short documentaries by Samah Khalaf Allah, from her project Marqa on queer presence during the Sudanese revolution.