Graduate Summer Programme 2024

The Graduate Summer Programme 2024 (GSP), “Are We Postcolonial?” took place between 15–26 July over two weeks in the UK and South Africa. Bringing together graduate students from the UK, Yale and South African universities, the programme intended to connect participants with each other and with other members of the UK and South Africa’s arts communities. The question mark in the theme served as the key peg around which deeply engaged conversations took shape. As the group travelled, talked and thought together for the period of the programme, what emerged was a set of provocations and ideas not only about how colonial histories matter and move in the world today but also what we as scholars and practitioners might do with our own and other histories.

It was led by Nontsikelelo Mutiti from the Yale School of Art, Sria Chatterjee and Sarah Turner from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and Edward Cooke from Yale’s Department of the History of Art with full day workshops at spaces such as Zeitz MOCAA, Chimurenga, the Whitechapel Gallery, Wysing Arts Centre and with artists and scholars such as Gavin Jantjes, Ilze Wolff, Premesh Lalu, the Otolith Group, Pablo Mukherjee, Anthony Gardner and others. Built as a collaborative, process-oriented programme, the idea was to think and learn together while challenging existing ideas in curious, open ways.

We are pleased to share some comments from our 2024 participants below:

"Since the GSP I've been mulling over the prefix 'post' in (post)coloniality/(post)apartheid alongside Ann Laura Stoler's book Imperial Durabilities in Our Times and Hugo ka Canham's Rioutus Deathscapes. The learning for me going forward is to treat 'post' with scepticism and uncertainty, that there is a disjuncture in our experience of time and the experience of history," Gcotyelwa Mashiqa.

"Sincerely, I appreciated becoming part of a constellation of researchers, artists and curators. With the support of the Paul Mellon Centre GSP, we found ways together to connect and defy global north/south borders that can separate us. Future research/practice will be informed by ways we formulated during the GSP to share resources, ideas and art-making outside a commercial gallery system," Lerato Maduna.

"The GSP has been an education in time-travel. It asks "How much do we have to dig into the future to uncover what our ancestors did?" as much as it asks "How do we kill time?" Standing at the foot of the Rhodes Memorial, one sees leaps of history in one glance: colonialism's shadow inked permanently into the ground, fragments shorn against Rhodes' ruins, the World War memorials, Sarah Baartman Hall, and Table Mountain, sitting in its longue durée. How to mourn all of this? Where do we enter, amidst corrugations and folds of time, to declare, over and over: "We'll evolve / From one germ / Molecule of freedom / Into millions more," and "No more / no more" (Steven Smith and Ilva Mackey, both quoted in posters by Gavin Jantjes)," Ekalan Hou.

Applications for the next Graduate Summer Programme will open in 2026. Sign up to our newsletter to be alerted.