Dates: 10–12 September 2025
Location: National Gallery of Zimbabwe (NGZ), Harare
Application Deadline: 10 August 2025
Are you an emerging or mid-career art writer, cultural critic, or researcher ready to deepen your craft and expand your voice? The ARAK Collection, in partnership with the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, is offering a unique opportunity to join a three-day intensive art writing workshop in Harare this September.
Led by acclaimed art critic, curator, and educator Thembinkosi Goniwe, this immersive programme will run from 10 to 12 September 2025 at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe.
Titled Zimbabwe on My Mind, the workshop builds on a conceptual framework launched earlier this year in Lusaka, where participants explored the biographies of subjects and objects — telling the stories of artists, artworks, archives, and spaces through a deeply narrative and imaginative lens.
The Harare edition will take this further, positioning art criticism as an embedded, reflective, and context-driven practice that responds to local realities and wider conversations.
Participants will work with selected works from the ARAK Collection (online) alongside local exhibitions, artworks, and cultural sites. The aim is to explore how both contemporary and historical materials can serve as anchors for critical and poetic biography.
Goniwe’s approach challenges participants to write analytically yet personally, asking:
How can a life or an object be read through its political, social, or material conditions?
How does an artist’s journey reflect a nation’s shifting regimes?
Can a studio or an archive embody a biography of its own?
What can writing rooted in local experience reveal about broader continental and global dialogues?
The workshop will open multiple pathways into Zimbabwe’s dynamic cultural landscape, including guided visits to artist studios and creative spaces in Harare to encourage first-hand engagement and observation.
Guided by Goniwe’s extensive experience, the three-day programme will combine writing exercises, group critique sessions, and site visits — helping each participant shape a working draft of a new text by the final day.
Application Guidelines
Applicants must reside in Zimbabwe and be available for all three days. To apply, please submit:
A 500-word writing sample (published or unpublished)
A short motivation statement (maximum 250 words) explaining why you wish to participate
A CV or brief biography
Contact details (email and reachable telephone number)
Email all materials to workshop@arakcollection.com by 10 August 2025.
