Slovak Aesthetics Forum with John Mugubi (Kenyatta University, Nairobi, Kenya)
Form, Function, And Survival: African Art Between Aesthetic Ideals And Historical Necessity 

May 14, 2025 / 3 p.m. (CET)

Microsoft Teams Meeting: https://tinyurl.com/4r7e29t7

FB event: https://www.facebook.com/events/542573212248825/

This lecture will examine the intricate entanglement between aesthetic form and historical necessity in the canon of African art, contending that African aesthetics, far from constituting an autonomous domain of disinterested beauty, are deeply embedded within socio-historical imperatives. In the African context, art will not be approached as mere ornamentation or passive contemplation; instead, it will be shown to emerge as a vital modality of cultural inscription infused with cosmological significance, mnemonic labour, and political intention. The lecture will propose a decisive departure from Western formalist paradigms, which often valourize aesthetic autonomy, in favour of African aesthetic frameworks that emphasize relationality, ritual efficacy, symbolic gravitas, and collective resonance.

Through an engagement with a range of expressive forms: sculptural, textile, performative, and cinematic, the lecture will illustrate how African artistic practices have historically operated as vehicles of resistance, repositories of embodied memory, and instruments of epistemic reclamation amid colonial ruptures, postcolonial reconstruction, and global recontextualizations. Drawing upon indigenous epistemologies and ontologies, the lecture will position African art as performative in essence and ethically charged, where beauty is not ornamental but necessary, and where artistic production becomes a site of historical narration and existential affirmation.

In aligning with variantist and aretaic models of expression and understanding, the lecture will underscore how aesthetic meaning in African art is co-created through performative engagement and imaginative apprehension. Ultimately, it will advocate for the repositioning of African visuality within global aesthetic discourses not as an ethnographic peripheral, but as a philosophically robust, self-defining tradition articulating its own grammar of beauty, necessity, and historical purpose.