Connect South Africa CERN

Since 2014 CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Geneva and, Pro Helvetia Swiss Arts Council have worked together to foster experimentation through the arts in connection with fundamental science. In 2021, they launched Connect, a collaboration framework that marks the extension of their joint efforts to support and promote dialogues between artists and scientists.

Arts at CERN, the Laboratory’s arts programme, fosters significant exchanges between art and physics. Artists across all creative disciplines are welcome at CERN to experience the way the big questions about our universe are pursued through fundamental research.

Connect South Africa

Connect South Africa forms part of this Connect global network, serving as a platform for interaction and dialogue between artistic and scientific communities across Switzerland, Chile, South Africa, and India. For the inaugural edition of this framework (2021–2024), South African and Swiss artists Kamil Hassim and Ian Purnell were selected to complete the Connect South Africa dual residency.

The residency precisely juxtaposes complementary scientific research scales. While CERN in Geneva addresses itself to the very smallest particles, the recently launched Square Kilometre Array project and the array of optical and radio astronomy installations spread across South Africa attend to the very largest expanses and masses.

To explore these dynamics, the artists spent three weeks at CERN, followed by five weeks at optical and radio astronomy observatories across the vast semi-desert expanses of the Northern Cape. These sites included the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory’s (SARAO) MeerKAT radio telescope near Carnarvon—the precursor to the Square Kilometre Array (SKA)—and the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT), operated by the South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO) near Sutherland.

In his residency project, transdisciplinary artist and musician Kamil Hassim aimed to create resonant instruments to draw connections between diasporic South African cosmologies and fundamental research conducted at CERN, SARAO and SAAO. Ian Purnell works across visual arts, documentary filmmaking and performing arts. With his residency project, he aims to explore the visual concept of black holes and reflect on alternative imaging of the universe.

The South African iteration of the residency framework was convened and realised by the curatorial and research platform —defunct context. The scientific partnerships were anchored by SARAO and SAAO, with Mónica Bello (Curator of Arts at CERN) and Dr George Mahashe (Associate Professor at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town) collaborating on the curation of the residencies. Dr Mahashe acted as the local convenor specifically through the framework of —defunct context.

Kamil Hassim

Kamil Adam Hassim is a transdisciplinary artist and researcher operating at the intersection of art, frontier science, and indigenous knowledge systems. His work investigates how unseen information is encoded, mediated, and made perceptible through instruments, networks, and cultural paradigms.

One of the youngest artists awarded a residency at CERN, Hassim is the only artist to have undertaken independent residencies across all major South African astronomical observatories—including South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO), the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT), the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO), MeerKAT, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), and Hartebeesthoek Radio Astronomy Observatory (HartRAO). These engagements ground his practice in sustained dialogue with scientific communities working at the limits of perception and measurement.

Drawing on cosmology, particle physics, and radio astronomy, he develops artistic apparatuses that translate abstract processes into embodied, perceptual experiences. Increasingly, his practice treats networks and digital infrastructures as media to explore digital sovereignty, AI training, and non-extractive models of knowledge organisation.

Hassim is currently developing "L-Infinity", a transdisciplinary Southern African research framework for experimental inquiry across science, technology, and culture. Alongside this, he is developing a digital cultural infrastructure project within the Ambient incubation programme in Durban, utilising "Fabrik" sovereign social network architecture to explore networked systems as a medium for community memory and trust. His work is presented and exhibited internationally.

Ian Purnell

Ian Purnell works at the intersection of visual art, documentary and performance

With a background in documentary filmmaking, Purnell’s practice involves using tools from cinema and the cinematographic space to explore the visual narratives humans create, such as scientific imagery, to understand the world and universe around them. His work often blurs the lines between fiction and reality, experimenting with performative elements, archive material and actual footage to wander around the limits of human perception.

His work has been screened at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Ann Arbor Film Festival (USA), Visions du Réel (CH), Sapporo Short Film Festival (JP), Berlin International Film Festival and the Julia Stoschek Collection Düsseldorf, among others. Ian Purnell studied documentary film at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne (KHM) and film editing Filmuniversität Potsdam-Babelsberg.