I am thrilled to announce that i passed my docotoral examination in Visual and Performing Art from Durban University of Technology (DUT). I am currently waiting for graduation expected in April 2026.
Title: Politics of the Gut: Food, Art and Colonial Modernity
Abstract
This dissertation attempts to lay out a terrain for food-based practice in the Fine Arts, where food is both the subject and medium/method of inquiry, and where food-based art practice is central to challenging dominant narratives, subverting visual economies, and foregrounding embodied and multisensorial dimensions that are often under-theorised in the visual arts.
This study brings together academic texts, scholarly work, cookbooks, archival materials, and art practices, to explore the intersections of food, memory, identity, race, gender and power and bringing life to questions of food and eating that are connected to ways of thinking about the body, of constructing both ideal and abject social bodies. This engagement aligns with the principles of practice-based research where creative practice is not separate but integral to the production of knowledge.
The visual, embodied and performative works explored and created as part of this study are not only part of the archive, but are actively employed as modes of analyses as this research proposes to think critically about food, race, gender and questions of power. In this way, we must also taste, smell, touch, serve, cook, and eat as acts that are deeply analytical and political. This convergence helps consider the research questions of how systems of knowledge and power frame food to the body and contribute to the shaping of contemporary food cultures and landscapes within the context of colonial modernity.