Alison Kearney is a Johannesburg based artist, researcher and arts educator whose multi-disciplinary work is dedicated to exploring and challenging the very foundations of how art is understood. Her research praxis involves both creating art and theorizing it, with a specific focus on decolonizing inherited Western discourses.
As an artist, Kearney critically engages with the institutions and conventions of the art world. Her artworks have been shown in numerous group exhibitions locally and abroad, with a notable solo exhibition, ‘Offerings,’ held at The Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg in 2008. Since 2022, she has been developing a new body of work titled “The Museum Under Erasure,” which uses performativity and parody to interrogate how cultural value is determined and to challenge institutional authority. These public performances actively explore the audience's role in the creative process and the making of meaning in conceptual art.
As a researcher and writer, Kearney is committed to theorizing modernist and contemporary African artworks in ways that break from Western epistemologies. She seeks to make explicit how both making and theorizing art can be forms of research, contributing to the decolonization of art history through unorthodox approaches to writing. This integrated philosophy underpins her work as an educator, both in her university teaching and in her public engagement with diverse audiences at the Wits Art Museum.
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Alison Kearney is a Johannesburg based artist, researcher and arts educator whose multi-disciplinary work is dedicated to exploring and challenging the very foundations of how art is understood. Her research praxis involves both creating art and theorizing it, with a specific focus on decolonizing inherited Western discourses.
As an artist, Kearney critically engages with the institutions and conventions of the art world. Her artworks have been shown in numerous group exhibitions locally and abroad, with a notable solo exhibition, ‘Offerings,’ held at The Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg in 2008. Since 2022, she has been developing a new body of work titled “The Museum Under Erasure,” which uses performativity and parody to interrogate how cultural value is determined and to challenge institutional authority. These public performances actively explore the audience's role in the creative process and the making of meaning in conceptual art.
As a researcher and writer, Kearney is committed to theorizing modernist and contemporary African artworks in ways that break from Western epistemologies. She seeks to make explicit how both making and theorizing art can be forms of research, contributing to the decolonization of art history through unorthodox approaches to writing. This integrated philosophy underpins her work as an educator, both in her university teaching and in her public engagement with diverse audiences at the Wits Art Museum.
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