This March, Guest Artists Space (G.A.S.) Foundation, in partnership with the Yinka Shonibare Foundation (Y.S.F.), announced the call for the pilot edition of the G.A.S. Critical Writing Workshop, an initiative designed to support the professional and critical development of emerging local art writers, researchers, and cultural practitioners. This edition explores critical art writing practices while examining how writing can function as a tool for activism, encouraging readers to ask questions, challenge narratives, and engage more deeply with the social and political contexts that shape contemporary art.

Bootleg Griot is an independent public library initiative dedicated to broadening access to literature and print media. Committed to collecting, preserving, and presenting works by artists, collectives, and writers of African descent, it serves as a resource for cultural continuity and exchange.

Functioning as a living archive of ideas, Bootleg Griot recognizes cultural preservation as essential to understanding and reclaiming ethnic histories, while fostering dialogue and knowledge-sharing within the community.

The Afrosonic Innovation Lab is a team of artists, creatives, and scholars actively engaged in the making of music, sound experimentation, and musicological analysis. We actively seek and cultivate projects globally which involve research creation, performance, publication, field research, and curation. While based in Toronto, we work across a number of sites in Canada and internationally.

African Style Archive (ASA) is a research platform and visual repository dedicated to documenting and preserving African fashion history. By collecting photographs, rare books, and ephemera, ASA connects historic and contemporary narratives of African dress, offering scholars, institutions, and cultural practitioners a vital resource for understanding how style reflects identity, politics, and creativity across the continent and diaspora.

Launched in 2020, the Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation (JCAF) is a foundation dedicated to research, technology and art. As a philanthropic institution, JCAF combines academic inquiry, a platform for museum-quality exhibitions and an innovative approach to knowledge creation in the Global South. Our ethos is to advance the appreciation of modern and contemporary art through the production, sharing and preservation of knowledge from the South. Our exhibitions are curated according to a theme and supported by a public programme that includes lectures, talks, performances, workshops and podcasts. We publish a journal that follows a structured research methodology, and our programmes and publications are offered for free to the public. JCAF is a non-collecting foundation. We explore the intersection of art, storytelling and technology to create an integrated and immersive experience for our visitors.

As a future-oriented institution, JCAF engages with leading thinkers, artists, professionals, scholars and the broader public to build a knowledge community. In doing so, we aim to foster meaningful encounters between visitors and artworks, while promoting intellectual exploration and encouraging collective engagement across disciplines.