Prof Nalini Moodley
Tshwane University of Technology
Unlearning Violence, Reimagining Futures: Artivism in the Struggle Against GBV
ABSTRACT
The welcome address for the second GBV symposium: Canvas for Change: Creative Pathways to Eradicate Gender-Based Violence (GBV) will be delivered by the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Design and leader of the Research Niche Area on Artivism as a Tool to Combat GBV.
This address explores the urgent need to confront GBV/F through the lens of Artivism and frames the symposium as a convergence of creative practice, critical scholarship, and social justice advocacy.
The address provides an overview of the national GBV landscape in South Africa while critically positioning higher education institutions as both sites of vulnerability and opportunity. These institutions, as spaces where future citizens and cultural leaders are shaped, become critical sites to shift norms about behaviour patterns that are entrenched in society.
It further critiques institutional complicity in GBV, illustrating how various power structures can replicate the dynamics of coercion and silence. This context underscores the need for alternative interventions that go beyond legal frameworks, hereby opening a gateway to creative possibilities.
Thus, Artivism becomes a necessary and powerful tool for social transformation, asserting that creative practice must be at the heart of GBV eradication strategies in higher education. It calls on students, researchers, and artists to use their work as a force for cultural and institutional change. Framing art as both a medium of healing and a form of protest, the address affirms that gender-based violence is not inevitable. In fact, it is through imagination, solidarity, and persistence that we can reimagine and create a world free from violence.
BIOGRAPHY
Prof Nalini Moodley is currently the Executive Dean in the Faculty of Arts and Design at the Tshwane University of Technology, South Africa. She has a B.A (Fine Arts), M.A. (Art History) cum laude, a UPGCE (cum laude) and completed her PhD in Art History at the University of KwaZulu-Natal which focused on the visual art produced by South Africans who graduated from the former Indian institution, the University of Durban Westville. She also holds an MBA in Higher Education Management from the Haaga-Helia University of Applied Sciences in Finland. Her present areas of research include the politics of minorities as well as the complexities of race and identity politics within a transforming South Africa. She has published papers in peer-reviewed journals on Hindu art and artists in South Africa, Indian dance, and the multiplicity of positionalities of South Africans. Prof Moodley is also the leader of the Research Niche Area “Addressing GBV Through Artivism at the Tshwane University of Technology, which explores how creative practice can confront gender-based violence through interdisciplinary and socially responsive innovative approaches.