Framed under the theme Ephemeral, the 2026 UJ Arts & Culture Programme emerges as a sensorial palimpsest where performance, visual art, and participatory encounters collide to articulate the fragile beauty of the momentary, aligning with the University of Johannesburg’s commitment to Pan-African excellence, social impact, and creative innovation, this year’s offering presents a curatorial ethos that privileges presence over permanence, creating an aesthetic of transience that resists commodification and instead foregrounds shared, embodied experience, the season unfolds as a dynamic procession of events—from Gregory Maqoma’s diasporic choreography and Bev Butkow’s suspended installations, to the inaugural ARAK Fellowship and risk-aware student theatre by Jade Bowers—that reveal how art dissolves borders while amplifying dialogue, these temporal interventions act as catalysts for reflection: whether in the haunting reverberations of Jeanne Zaidel-Rudolph’s Human Rights Oratorio, the spatial poetics of Chronogram, or the spiritual jazz-inflected chants of ESINAM and Sibusile Xaba, each component of the programme enacts ephemerality not as disappearance, but as an imprint, a spectral architecture of thought and feeling that persists beyond the artwork’s physicality, one emblematic case is The Bacchae: An African Choral Ballet, a bold synthesis of classical myth, African cosmology, and choral choreography that exemplifies how transient events can generate sustained transformation across artistic and cultural registers, directed by Jay Pather and scored by Neo Muyanga, the production confronts the viewer with the porous threshold between tradition and experiment, conclusionally, UJ’s 2026 initiative doesn’t merely programme events—it curates moments that matter, asking audiences to embrace the liminality of live art as a generative force, shaping the social imaginary long after lights dim and spaces empty, and in doing so, the institution reinforces its role as a cultural conduit, where temporary works ignite enduring resonance.
