What is Research Now? Day 1

14 May 2025
4:00 – 9:00 pm
Paul Mellon Centre and Online

What is Research Now? presents a full year of programming around interconnected strands that ask us to think more curiously, critically and open-endedly about the role and practice of the arts.

The theme is led by the question: Can research in the arts enable us to live and better inhabit the world together?

It will bring artists, curators, writers, scholars and thinkers from a range of different backgrounds to think together through lectures, performances, conversations, and hands-on workshops at the Paul Mellon Centre in London.

In May, events will explore interconnected strands:

'Ongoing Colonial Worlds' asking what research is under conditions of occupation and unrest

'On Looking' show us that how we look changes how we understand the world around us

All Day Events

16.00-16.15 – What Do We Do Now?, Sria Chatterjee (Paul Mellon Centre)

16.15-16.55 – Unconfessed Architectures, Huda Tayob (Royal College of Art)

16.55-17.05 – Comfort break

17.05-17.45 – Aesthetics After Apartheid: Racism’s Last Word and the Work of Art, Premesh Lalu (University of the Western Cape)

17.45-18.15 – Huda Tayob and Premesh Lalu In-conversation + Q&A

18.15-19.15 – Refreshments and a light dinner provided

19.15-19.55 – Afterimages and the Art of Grieving, Tina Campt (Princeton University)

19.55-20.15 – Q&A

20.15-21.00 – Reception

Bursaries

Building Accessibility

Code of Conduct for Visitors

Image credit: Annual Barrydale Reconciliation Day Festival featuring the UWC Centre for Humanities Research at the University of Western Cape, Handspring Puppet Company, Net vir Pret, Ukwanda Puppet and Design ART Collective, Barrydale, Western Cape, South Africa, 16 December 2023. Image courtesy of UWC Centre for Humanities Research at the University of Western Cape / Photo: Retha Ferguson.

About the speakers

Tina M. Campt is Roger S. Berlind ’52 Professor of Humanities in the Department of Art and Archaeology and the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University. She is a Black feminist theorist of visual culture and contemporary art and lead convener of the Practicing Refusal Collective and the Sojourner Project, as well as a founding scholar of Black European Studies. Tina has published five books including her latest monograph, A Black Gaze: Artist Changing How We See (MIT Press, 2021). She received the 2020 Photography Catalogue of the Year Award from Paris Photo and Aperture Foundation for her co-edited collection, Imagining Everyday Life: Engagements with Vernacular Photography (with Marianne Hirsch, Gil Hochberg and Brian Wallis, Steidl, 2020).
Sria Chatterjee is Head of Research Initiatives at the Paul Mellon Centre. Sria’s research interests lie at the intersection of art, science and environment and she publishes extensively on these topics. Sria leads the multi-year Climate & Colonialism research project at the Paul Mellon Centre. In 2020, she founded and led the award-winning digital project, Visualizing the Virus.

Before coming to the Paul Mellon Centre, Sria was a fellow at the Max-Planck Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz and an advanced researcher at the FHNW Academy of Art and Design in Basel, Switzerland, where she held a Swiss National Science Foundation fellowship. She served as a contributing editor for British Art Studies from 2020–22 and remains involved in the journal as Editorial Advisor. In 2024, Sria is on research leave from the Paul Mellon Centre on a fellowship at the Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University. In 2023, Sria served as a judge for the Pen Hessell-Tiltman Prize for historical non-fiction. Sria received her PhD from the Department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University in 2019.
Premesh Lalu holds a UK-SA Digital Humanities Chair in Culture and Technics at the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR) at the University of the Western Cape (UWC), South Africa. Premesh is the former Director and Convenor of the Flagship on Critical Thought in African Humanities in the CHR. He is the author of The Deaths of Hintsa: Postapartheid South Africa and the Shape of Recurring Pasts (2009) and Undoing Apartheid (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2022).
Kitso Lynn Lelliott’s practice moves between video installation, film and writing. She is preoccupied with enunciations from spaces beyond cognitive power and the crisis such epistemically disobedient articulations cause to hegemony. Her work interrogates the “real” as it is shaped through contesting conciousnesses, their narratives and the form these took across the Atlantic during the formative episode that shaped the modern age. Her work is an enactment of articulating from elision and between historically subjugated subjectivities, privileging South-South relations in respect of imagination and knowledge yet unmediated by the Global North.

In 2017 she was laureate of the Iwalewahaus art award and was a featured guest artist at The Flaherty Seminar 2018. In 2019 Kitso-Lynn won the NIHSS award for best visual arts. She was a postdoctoral fellow and artist in residence with the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR) at the University of the Western Cape and artist in residence with the Cité internationale des arts in Paris in 2019. She was with the CHR until 2022 when she took up a senior lectureship with the University of the Witwatersrand and was recipient of the biannual Henrike Grohs Art Award in 2024. She will be taking up an artist residency with The International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York in summer of 2025.
Jyoti Mistry (PhD) is Professor in Film at HDK-Valand at University of Gothenburg. She works with film as a research form and mode of artistic practice. She has made critically acclaimed films in multiple genres and her installation work draws from cinematic traditions but is often re-contextualized for galleries and museums that are outside of the linear cinematic experience. Most recent: Loving in Between (2023) premiered at Locarno International Film Festival and Cause of Death (2020) premiered at Berlinale International Film Festival. Her current research focus is on indigenous Sámi schools in Sweden’s colonial history. Recent publications: International Journal of Film and Media Arts: “Transversal Entanglement - Artistic Research in Film” (2022) and a special issue of Film Education Journal “Decolonising Film Education” (June 2022). From 2021 to 2024 she was editor-in-chief of PARSE (Platform of Artistic Research in Sweden). In 2016, she received the CILECT Teaching Award for innovation in film research and pedagogy. She has supervised numerous creative arts PhDs at HDK-Valand and the Wits School of Arts, University of Witwatersrand in South Africa. From September 2024 to October 2025, Mistry is Leverhulme Visiting Professor at SOAS (University of London).
Huda Tayob is a South African architect, architectural historian and theorist. Her research focuses on minor, migrant and subaltern architectures, architectural ghost stories and working with archival silences in the built environment more generally. It also highlights the African continent and south-south connections, as sites from where we might rethink architectural cultures. She has been a Mellon Fellow on the Canadian Centre for Architecture project, Centring Africa (2020–2022), a Graham Foundation Grantee holder (2023; 2022) and received the Scott Opler Emerging Scholar Award (2019). She is co-curator of the open access curriculum Racespacearchitecture.org and the lead curator of the digital exhibition, Archive of Forgetfulness. She was a participant in the 18th International Architecture exhibition in Venice (2023) with a project titled Index of Edges, which traces watery archives, methods and stories along East African coastal edges from Cape Town to Port Said.