Bio
heeten bhagat was born in Zimbabwe. Presently, he oscillates between Cape Town and any place that involves long-distance travel. He works in the emerging terrain of ‘pracademics’, nurturing collaborations and design experiments between academia and real-life systems. He designs pragmatic and provocative programming to support decolonial and diversity-expanding processes in overlooked and underserved environments. Key to this work is troubling superimposed systems of scholarship, catalysing the minutiae so as to propose alternate learning processes. His experience encompasses a broad set of disciplines that range from art history to urban studies, architecture to fashion and sociology to museology, and spans the learning spectrum – rural, community and informal spaces through to established cultural and academic institutions. His research interests revolve around setting up sites of experiment to play to test out speculative, imaginative and transdisciplinary aspirations. The broad range of his experience recommends him into these spaces in formation, that are looking to engage dissonance as a way to activate pathways towards inspired productivities.
PUBLICATIONS
PEER REVIEWED/ PUBLISHED
• Litera[ri]ly Laterally: Re-Revisioning Marechera for Educational Films in Moving Spirit: The Legacy of Dambudzo Marechera in the 21st Century, Edited by Julie Cairnie and Dobrota Pucherova, 2012
RESEARCH REPORTS
• Exercising Imagination(s) (2022), MuseumFutures Africa Publication, Goethe Institute – article
• New African Urban University: Workshop Syntheses
FORTHCOMING
Book Chapters
• Predicting the Passed: Que[e]ring costume and design in Black Panther: FASHION + READER
• This image may contain… in Practice as Research (University of Cape Town)
• Broadly, Speaking in Africa’s Fashion Diaspora, Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT)
Experiments
• Fragments: Producing out of violence. PARSE Journal
IN DEVELOPMENT (ALL 2022)
• Only an idiot could have written this: Traffic lights as a site for play, journal article.
• Performing Good(ness) (working title): Newton Food Research Project 2017 – 2019
NON-PEER REVIEWED
• taura/i zvenu (2019), FIVE BHOBH: PAINTING AT THE END OF AN ERA, Zietz MOCAA, Catalogue
• The People’s/The Peoples Painter, Lovemore Kambudzi: I Have Walked Through the Crowds, 2012, Artist
CATALOGUES
• Art and the influence of western popular culture: why Caucasians are the main buyers of art in an African country, (2010) Artlife, Volume 2, No. 4
• “Curating” by a curator, (2010), Artlife, Volume 2, No. 3
• Why are tents triangular? Why is the triangle pink?, (2009), Athi Patra Ruga, Artist
MONOGRAPH
• What Dada Does, (2021), SWAG (Something We Africans Got)
ALTERNATIVE MEDIA
Podcasts
• Smart Townships: An Inquiry in Five Parts (2022) – a feminist research study for Research ICT Africa
• The Other Story: Sexual Ontologies in Harare, Zimbabwe (2012 – 2015) – T3/Nyayaz
Exhibition/Curation
• Re-imagining The Jagger Library: An exhibition of early imaginings (2022) – UCT Futures Think Tank / Molly Blackburn Memorial Hall
• Food Consumption and Ethics in South African Cities – Postcards, Tea towels and Posters as creative outputs of a research study
Conferences
• Sensing the City: How arts and aesthetics can (un)think urban studies, ECAS 2019: African:
Connections and Disruptions, Edinburgh, Scotland 11-14 June 2019
• Only an idiot could have written this: Mapping performance/s at traffic Lights in Harare, Zimbabwe. African Infrastructure Futures, Cape Town, South Africa, 21-23 November 2022
• This is Stupid: Peripheral Pedagogical Practices, ECAS 2023: African Futures, Cologne, Germany, 31 May – 2 June 2023
