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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Aims of […]

1. […] is a platform for Creative Research from the Global South, with an emphasis on African and diasporic practices of knowledge production.
2. For […] Creative Research encompasses artistic research, practice-led research and research as creative practice, all of which are acknowledged as submissible forms of research and valid methodologies of knowledge formation.  
3. […] aims to reflect Global South approaches to critical artistic research as support for decolonial practices.  Inviting disenfranchised and new methodologies of knowledge production to both challenge and expand traditional/colonial conceptions of academic research and validity in academic research.
4. […] seeks to trouble the established knowledge economy of the university and academia, and the ways in which ’research’ is produced, governed and circulated (or withheld), by presenting (and re-centering) decolonial creative research as open-access content on an interactive online platform.
5. […]  is an experiment in form, supporting multi and cross-disciplinary work in which conventional written research practices are productively intertwined with new media, audio,  visual and interactive forms of production and publication in the digital.
6. […] embraces Creative Research work across a broad range of disciplines, pushing the digital humanities into productive dialogue with the visual and performing arts, music, sociology, anthropology, African Literature, architecture and other fields of cultural and creative study.
7. […] aims to make transparent the processes and critical developments involved in its approach to, and support of, creative research work, reflecting the journal’s stated commitment to decolonising knowledge and research methodologies.
8. […] holds digital production and dissemination within the context of global souths, as an opening of restricted and restrictive hardcopy formats and archives, and an opening of methods and channels in its aim to decolonise creative research and knowledge production.

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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:

1. Submissions that respond to the open call and align with the thematic or critical knowledge concern the issue in question.
2. 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:

1. Submissions meet the submission criteria of the issue and Journal and align with the aims of the Journal (see above), which will include:
2. The extent to which the submission engages critically and creatively with questions of knowledge production.
3. The extent to which the submission acts as a meaningful contribution to knowledge making on/in creative decolonial research related to the Global South.
4. 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:

1. Accepted for publication as proposed in the submission.
2. Request a revision on aspects of the submission before acceptance.
3. 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:

1. 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.
2. 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.

[…] Reviewers

• Amie Soudien
• Annie Paul
• Athena Mazarakis
• Athi Mongezeleli Joja
• Bettina Malcomess
• Carine Zaayman
• Cathérine Hug
• Christo Doherty
• Clare Loveday
• Danai Mupotsa
• Diana Ibanez Lopez
• Edda Sickinger
• Ernst van der Wal
• Etienne Viviers
• Fabian Saptouw
• Francis Burger
• George E. Lewis
• George Mahashe
• Gwen Miller
• James Macdonald
• Janine Allen-Spies
• Joanna Grabski
• Joshua Reno
• Juanita Praeg
• Kurt Campbell
• Lionel Manga
• Louise Hall
• Maria Ines Rodriguez
• Michelle Stewart
• Mika Conradie
• Mokale Koapeng
• Naadira Patel
• Natalia Esling
• Nathanie Luneburg
• Nishlyn Ramanna
• Raél Jero Salley
• Sarah de Villiers
• Thandi Loewenson
• Theo Herbst
• Ulrich Süsse
• Victoria Ogoegbunam Okoye
• Vulindlela Nyoni
• Zoé Samudzi

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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Regional Board Members

Molemo Moiloa lives and works in Johannesburg, and has worked in various capacities at the intersection of creative practice and community organizing. She currently works on notions of ungovernability, social infrastructures of cultural organizing, and relationships to nature. She is one half of the artist collaborative MADEYOULOOK, who explore everyday popular imaginaries and their modalities for knowledge production. She currently leads research at Andani.Africa, with a focus on open restitution debates and is one of the inaugural AfricaNoFilter Fellows 2020/2021 for this subject. MADEYOULOOK was nominated for the Vera List Center Prize for Art and Politics 2016/17 at the New School, New York. Molemo was also a Chevening Clore Fellow 2016/17, and winner of a Vita Basadi Award for 2017.

Prof. Vulindlela Nyoni is Head of the Head of Department (Visual Arts), Nelson Mandela University.  Nyoni  was born in Chilimanzi, Zimbabwe in 1976 and attained a Bachelor of Arts in the Fine Arts from the then University of Natal in 1998 and a Masters in fine Arts from the now University of KwaZulu-Natal in 2006. His Masters thesis was entitled “Representations of ‘other’ in selected South African artworks: Re-membering the black male body”. Prior to moving to Port Elizabeth, Nyoni was the Academic Coordinator of the Centre for Visual Art, University of KwaZulu-Natal (Pietermaritzburg), and Senior Lecturer in printmaking at Stellenbosch University. Apart from being a practicing artist, Nyoni also lectures in Printmaking at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University. His main interests lie in Diaspora studies, Gender and Sexuality; and the politics of representation and self-representation through print media. He continues to make his own work at any opportunity he has.

Zoé Samudzi (PhD) is a writer whose work has appeared in The New Inquiry, Verso, The New Republic, Daily Beast, Art in America, Hyperallergic, ROAR Magazine, Teen Vogue, Arts.Black, and other outlets. She is a contributing writer at Jewish Currents. She is also a photographer and was an archivist with MATATU Nomadic Cinema. Along with William C. Anderson, she is the co-author of As Black as Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Our Liberation (AK Press). She is currently a fellow with Political Research Associates. She is represented by Alison Lewis at the Zoë Pagnamenta Agency.

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.