My research is focussed on exploring the ways that contemporary African artists challenge the historic and neo-avant-garde discourses of art through my art making, theoretical scholarship on African art, and by developing ways of engaging with art in the art museum. My interest in the ways that artists engage with discourses of art led me to explore how artists challenge the ontologies of art in my PhD titled “Beyond the Readymade: Found Objects in Contemporary South African Art” (obtained in 2016). While conducting my PhD research, I became interested in how the legacies of avant-garde practices have become part of accepted, artistic practices in global contemporary art making practices. I questioned the ways in which contemporary South African artists’ use of found objects could be understood, other than as anti-art, since found objects have been part of art making practices longer than acrylic paint. 

In the paper “Art History is Dead, Long Live Art History” I question what call for the decolonisation of university curricula imply for disciplines like art history which emerged at the time of colonial expansion and the categorising of knowledge that came with the enlightenment? I begin by briefly exploring the origins of the discipline, in order to create a platform from which to consider contemporary art history writing. I then consider the ways in which the decolonisation of the discipline could be understood as the end of art history. A reflection of some of the affordances and limitations of the rhetoric in which calls for decolonisation are framed, leads me to consider methods of writing art history that could be construed as acts of decolonisation. I conclude by suggesting that one way to decolonise the discipline is to foreground the author’s subjective voice when writing arts histories. Since this paper was published, I have continued investigating processes of interpretation and ways of writing arts' histories. In particular, I question what is an appropriate way to approach interpretation and write about African art that is relevant to our current socio-political context? My exploration is carried out through my approach to writing and what I choose to write about.