Hope sub-verse

I hear music

Mighty fine music

Up above my head (Up above my head)

I hear music in the air (I hear music in the air)

Sister Rosetta Tharpe

How is hope performed as a political act, as a subversive break, as an opening to the possibility of difference, of change, of life otherwise? Is it embedded as a certain promise within acts of resistance - as for Bantu Steve Biko, rejecting the dominant norms of whiteness and apartheid was intrinsic to the promise of Black Consciousness itself, in gifting the world “a more human face”? 

This is a link, a political entanglement, close to the thinking of contemporary Black feminists like Tina Campt and Saidiya Hartman, for whom the political work of ‘practicing refusal’ is not limited to the total deconstruction of edifices of power, but is bound to a certain belief in the possibility of a differently imagined future. Here, everyday enactments of refusal, whether quiet or bold, personal or collective, whether acts of thinking, speaking, cooking, sharing, making or performing, become the radical enactments of a politics of hope.

Hope sub-verse welcomes applications in which artistic practices respond to conditions of normalcy and violence in ways that refuse and re-imagine - that “hear music in the air”, and lay a claim to life, joy and a politics of hope. 

shortlisted artists

Shamil Balram

Ayabonga Magwaxaza

Pebofatso Mokoena

Jade Palmer

Tehillah Snyman