I am an expert in ecological and decolonial approaches to modern and contemporary art and architecture in the Global South. I was awarded a PhD in History of Art in 2017 for my study on African landscape art from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg; my monograph Civilising Grass: The Art of the Lawn on the South African Highveld was published in 2019 by Wits University Press.

 

One principal area of my research and teaching is concerned with decolonial approaches to contemporary African art and its relationship to modern African architecture and the built environment. I work on Congolese artists Body Isek Kingelez and Sammy Baloji, Mozambican artist Angela Ferreira and Mozambican architect Pancho Guedes, Angolan artist Kiluanji Kia Henda, and South African photographers David Goldblatt and Santu Mofokeng. In the co-edited volume Creative Cities in Africa: Critical Architecture and Urbanism (2023), we have drawn together scholars from across the world to offer a decolonial examination of African public sculpture, anti-colonial art, modern architecture, and exhibiting curating architecture.

 

My present work is concerned with archival processes, repatriation, digital politics, climate control and collection storage, and epistemic justice in Brazilian and UK-based African art and natural history collections. This work on the ecologies of natural history extends into the Brazilian Amazon and involves extended archival and collections fieldwork. I am particularly interested in the poetics of deforestation science and the aesthetic agency of on-going forest struggles. In South Africa, my ecological art history has been focussed on the expanded genre of landscape in relation to an important digitisation project in South Africa on what we have called the People’s Parks Archive. A short-lived moment in 1985 of radical landscape, gardening and public art by young black South Africans against apartheid, the People’s Parks were destroyed by the security forces and what remains is the archive we are digitising in collaboration with artist and activists.