An opening of restricted and restrictive hardcopy formats and archives

Challenging and expanding traditional/colonial conceptions of academic validation

African, diasporic and south led knowledge production through Creative Research

Decolonising creative research

Online and interactive journal for creative research from the Global South

Ellipses is an experiment in form, supporting multi and cross-disciplinary work

Framing Statement & Objectives of […]

[...] ellipses denotes a grammatical troubling, an opening or caesura in the linear flow of a sentence, marking intentional omission, absent content. Alternatively, the application of ellipses... as aposiopesis signals a certain trailing off, a sentence ending or not ending in the suspension of unresolved thought… It resists pronunciation or being easily saved as a file or turned into a URL. For these deviant, troubling and open-ended features, ellipses […] – applied without prefix or suffix – works as a conceptual space or marker hospitable to the contingent, collaborative and multi/cross-disciplinary work of creative research in the global south supported by this digital and online journal.

What discourses, paradigms, tropes or structures shape or censor different kinds of knowledge production, and how can alternative modes of meaning-making imagine and make possible a more just and livable world? ellipses asks these questions from an explicitly Global South perspective – rooted in the local, open to the diasporic and informed by a range of practices, processes and tactics that deviate from conventional, analytical and colonial modes of knowledge production. ellipses is a collaborative platform, drawing editors and contributors into creative dialogue with digital arts practitioners, and encouraging interactive and digitally published scholarship that extends beyond the rarefied space of the academy. It is an experiment with form, prioritising sonic, visual, oral, performative, visceral, embodied, spatial and temporal modalities of practice, invested in questions of why, how and for whom knowledge is produced, and by what criteria deemed ‘valid’. ellipses supports a growing community of scholars, artists, curators, creative practitioners and collectives, thinking and working in and from the Global South. In each issue ellipses is imagined as another opportunity to rethink the ways in which creative research and the ‘aesthetic’ is bound to the machinations of dominant knowledge economies, and to creatively explore more enabling, and culturally responsive modes of meaning-making.

ellipses was founded by a collective of artists in 2015 at the Wits School of Arts as a multi/cross-disciplinary, digital, online and interactive journal for creative research, by collective responsive to the urgent political demand for the decolonisation of knowledge and the university mobilised by #rhodesmustfall and #feesmustfall. The journal is supported by the Wits School of Art, steered by a local, regional and international appointed Editorial Board ellipses has published four issues to date, and one special edition. ellipses publishes annually, with issue V scheduled release in September 2025.

The first issue of ellipses was marked by a process both pragmatic and speculative and is product of grant money from WITS University’s SPARC fund, and as such was designed to function as an accredited journal located within the WITS School of Arts (WSOA). The second issue of ellipses and four that follow were supported by Art Research Africa, developing Creative and Artistic Research within the Wits School of Arts and supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. ‍

ellipses is located within the WITS School of Arts, and owes much to the energy and commitment of its staff and students. ellipses prioritises partnerships and currently is working on special issues with SWOP (Society Work and Politics) at WITS, The Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL).

ellipses is additionally funded by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

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Peer Review Process

Submission, shortlisting and peer reviews are conducted online in a protected and archived submission system. Selection and review follow this process:

Editorial Selection and Review: an initial shortlisting of submissions is conducted by the Issue Editor/s. This shortlisting is aimed at identifying:

Submissions that respond to the open call and align with the thematic or critical knowledge concern the issue in question.
Assuring balanced representation in the submissions being put forward for peer review.

Editorial Board & Double Blind Peer Review is conducted against shortlisted submissions, this is done by both a panel of elected peer reviewers and selected members of the Editorial Board. Reviewers assess the following:

Submissions meet the submission criteria of the issue and Journal and align with the aims of the Journal (see above), which will include:
The extent to which the submission engages critically and creatively with questions of knowledge production.
The extent to which the submission acts as a meaningful contribution to knowledge making on/in creative decolonial research related to the Global South.
Has no legal or ethical concerns.

Review Outcomes will be sent directly to authors by the Editor in Chief and Issue Editors as one of the following outcomes and with instructions for next steps:

Accepted for publication as proposed in the submission.
Request a revision on aspects of the submission before acceptance.
Rejected for publication (to be accompanied with reasons for the rejection).

Critical Engagement & Knowledge Transparency

[…] Ellipses Journal for Creative Research is committed to opening up and making transparent the processes of criticality and knowledge development for Creative Research in the Global South. In an act towards radicalising the methods of generation, review, development and publication, our issues are subject to any of the following:

Open to Editorial Teams for Issues: we understand that knowledge and critical engagement in the Global South more often than not takes place within communities of practice rather than with individuals. We therefore encourage the election of editors and editorial teams from collectives, partnerships and knowledge collectives.
Post Review Publication: in following the historical trajectory of Ellipses and its founding in the collective production of its first issue aimed at knowledge production transparency – we ask for post and some pre-publication reviews to be published alongside published research submissions.

Community Knowledge Engagements: following publication Ellipses aims to bring the published research into an engagement with a community of practice in Creative Research, in the global south and its diaspora. This is done by working with editors and editorial teams to develop knowledge events or actions that aim to expand visibility and further engagement with the themes and methodologies of the issue and research in question.

WITS School of the Arts Board

‍Prof. René Smith Head of the Wits School of the Arts. René Smith has taught at a variety of institutions of higher education in South Africa and worked across sectors on a diverse range of projects including gender mainstreaming and integration; a review of South Africa's communications Regulator and unearthing Labour archives towards a public mobile exhibition. She has served on a number of governing boards, and has been a member of the Institute of Directors of Southern Africa since 2009. She completed her BA Hons at Falmouth College of Arts, now Falmouth University in the United Kingdom. She has a MA cum laude and a PhD in Media & Cultural Studies from University of KwaZulu-Natal.

Prof. Christo Doherty is Associate Professor working across the Wits School of Arts, and the WITS Innovation Centre (WIC) at the University of the Witwatersrand.

Bettina Malcomess (PhD) is a writer, academic and artist. Her work exists in a diverse set of media and forms, ranging from long duration performance, to the staging of shorter interventions, and installation projects to the book as site of practice. She produces performances under the name Anne Historical. Malcomess’ writing traverses art, film, history, urbanism, as well as fiction. She co-authored the book Not No Place. Johannesburg, Fragments of Spaces and Times (Jacana, 2013). She was the visual editor of the book Routes and Rites to the City: Mobility, Diversity and Religious Space in Johannesburg (Palgrave, 2017). She has recently formed an interdisciplinary project called the joining room, a non|space for intermedial intimacies. Historical/Malcomess’ work has shown at various national and international exhibitions and spaces. She is a lecturer in Visual Arts at Wits School of Arts and is currently doing a PhD in Film Studies at Kings College, London.

(Chair) Zen Marie (PhD) is an artist, filmmaker and educator based in Johannesburg, South Africa. His practice and research engage video, film, photography, performance, and writing, using site-specific or relational processes to critically explore power relations within spaces. Marie holds a Doctor of Philosophy in Fine Art from the University of the Witwatersrand (WITS), an MA in Cultural Analysis from the University of Amsterdam (with distinction) a Bachelor of Arts in Fine Art from the University of Cape Town (with distinction) and is a past participant of the prestigious 'de ateliers' program in Amsterdam. Marie is also HoD of the Department of Fine Art at WITS University, where he has taught since his appointment in 2009.

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International Board Members

Prof Raél Jero Salley is an artist, professor, speaker & writer. Salley is the Founding Director of The Space for Creative Black Imagination, the Chair of the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), Visiting Faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and former faculty at the University of Cape Town in South Africa (UCT). Raél (rah-El) is also a martial arts instructor, a yoga instructor, a plant lover, and Mazie’s grandson. Find more at www.raelsalley.studio.

Reece Auguste is Assistant Professor, University of Boulder in Colorado (USA). He is a documentary filmmaker and scholar whose research focuses on national cinemas, transnational screen cultures and documentary media practices. He was a co-founder of the seminal Black Audio Film Collective, which was at the forefront of radical filmmaking in ‘80s and ‘90s Britain. With BAFC, Auguste wrote and directed the award winning Twilight City and Mysteries of July. His essays on screen aesthetics and documentary practices have appeared in Framework, Cineaction, Undercut, Journal of Media Practice, The British Avant-Garde Film 1926-1995, Questions of Third Cinema, Dark Eros, The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Media and The Ghosts of Songs: The Film Art of the Black Audio Film Collective. He is the recipient of the Grand Prize at Melbourne International Film Festival; Josef Von Sternberg Award, for most original film of the Mannheim International Film Festival, Golden Hugo Award for best Documentary at the Chicago International Film Festival, and the International Documentary Association.

George Shire is a London based, Zimbabwean cultural theorist, self styled Bandungist and historian of ideas who has been engaged with questions of knowledge from the global south, with visual culture and decolonisation, and with tracking histories of art education in Southern Africa. His intellectual interests are moored inside the cultural studies tradition set out by Stuart Hall. His research interests are primarily in the intersections of artistic and political practice; working at the intersection of black studies, the place of colonialism in the making of modernity, and the material and technical politics of the Indian ocean. He is a member of the international editorial boards of the British New Left Journal “Soundings” and the peer reviewed journal DarkMatter. He previously taught at the Richmond Upon Thames College, London; the Open University; Central Saint Martin’s College of Art & Design, University of the Arts London; and Birkbeck College, University of London. He is a DJ, Jazz Saxophone player and I-Phone Photographer.

Published by The Wits School of the Arts
University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa

Issue [2] Open the Gates

Editorial by Issue II Editors: Bettina Malcomess and Pervaiz Khan

[…] is an online publication and peer reviewed platform for creative research realised in live, digital formats. For this second issue of […] the editors, Bettina Malcomess, Pervaiz Khan made an open call for creative work across a range of disciplines that responds to another call: open the gates. The digital editor, Tegan Bristow, has managed the overall realisation of the web design with the assistance of MA research candidates at the Wits School of Arts, Alana Blignaut and Andrea Hayes, alongside Riaan Pietersen an independent backend developer.

The theme, Open the Gates suggests an actual and metaphorical opening of new possibilities, new assemblages and relations within sites of knowledge production. The call asked for projects that re-imagine and re-think the manifestation of creative research within the framework of an online journal. Ellipses foregrounds questions of the creative act and the modes of representation and remediation necessary and possible in the spaces of contemporary knowledge production online. Tangential to this thematic are questions of how creative research is measured, conceived and produced within the academy. An opening of the institutional gates and the boundaries of disciplines opens possibilities for the emergence of new and multiple languages, forms and modes of presentation.

This second edition of […] has focused on the realisation of original creative research work within the digital platform, as well as the translation of existing work into digital formats. A number of proposals were received from a range of artistic and academic practitioners and researchers, from which a selection of 6 projects was made.

The editorial process has involved a sustained conversation across technical, theoretical and artistic languages in order to arrive at a unique structure for each project. For existing work, the digital realisation has meant much more than documentation of an existing piece (be it performative, narrative or archival work) but a thinking that embeds the project’s form within the multiple logics of the online platform. The projects span work engaging directly with the education system and the archive as forms of embodied knowledge. Other works explore the possibilities of digital affect and audience.

Sumeya Gasa, Shameelah Khan and Dylan Valley’s Songs At The Gates looks at the after effects of the 2015/16 protests on students. It is the beginnings of a polyphonic repository providing an online space for ongoing reflection. This project sits in conversation with Thuli Gamedze’s Rethinking Education as Conversation, a digital iteration of the artist and writer’s physical mind mapping works, now unfolding on a digital wall, to ask urgent questions about the decolonisation of the higher education system. Jurgen Meekel’s Palinopsia /After Image interrogates presence and absence through the appearance and gradual disappearance of death mask-like images. This along with other pieces bear out the particularity of digital epistemologies and ontologies within the twin conditions of permanence and ephemerality. Here, Felix Kawitzky and Marianne Thesen Law’s Portal: the letters presents an archive for a disappearance, somewhere between a fiction and research project, the work brings together several collaborators who playfully stage the points at which the language of research as ‘search’ break down. Jacaranda Time: Diagrams of Collaboration, a collaboration between Cameron Harris, Mwenya Kabwe, Sonja Radebe and Tegan Bristow, also reflects the complexities of the translation of a live performance project into an interactive online archive. Jonathan Kane’s 60+: Queer Old Joburg works with material from the Gay and Lesbian Archive to present a kind of digital derive in a daring non-linear format that collapses the timeline, the collection, the interview and the map.

Each of these projects search for a language with which to manifest creative research by practicing a mode of what Irit Rogof terms ’embodied criticality’: ‘a state of duality … from which one cannot exit or gain a critical distance … the point of criticality is not to find an answer but rather to access a different mode of inhabitation … ‘. Embodied Criticality is thus compared by Rogof to a form of smuggling, of being both inside and outside. As part of this continual questioning of the place and value of creative research within the academy […] has, with the permission of peer reviewers (some of whom have chosen to remain anonymous) published peer reviews alongside projects. The replies of makers to peer reviews will in some cases also be visible, making transparent the normally opaque workings of academic processes of the valuation of creative research.

Ellipses edition II speaks to the exciting potential to rethink disciplinary boundaries within the arts, but also between arts and sciences. It attempts to explore and cross the divide between the physical and material space of artistic, musical and performative practices, critical theory and digital dissemination.