Past Events
marikiscrycrycry, $ELFIE$ at Fierce, 2017, photo by Manuel Vason
'if you.. / criticality in and of, as, care' by Claricia Parinussa
Thursday 9 March 2023
17:30 - 19:00
Reid Lecture Theatre, Reid Building, GSA
Book via Eventbrite
A discussion and Q+A with artist, producer, facilitator, researcher and community organiser Claricia Parinussa.
As part of Caring Between Practices programme strand, Claricia offered a provocation centring a criticality in and of care, as care, rooted in value-based approaches across their multifaceted practice. Claricia’s work cultivates through a relational, body-based approach which emerges across thinking, moving, writing and doing with a decolonial intention. They are founder & lead facilitator of ID.Y CIC, a QTIBIPOC focussed arts support entity carrying out producing, production management, programme curation, artist development, research, advocacy and anti racist practice facilitation.
As Nusa Revlon, member of the underground ballroom community with the international Iconic House of Revlon, Nusa also leads House Ball Scotland; a platform, home, connection point for QTIBIPOC with the underground Scottish Ballroom Community, and educational entity for allies and wider communities. Nusa’s community work focusses on potentials of self-empowerment, solidarity and genuine accountability which work towards generative intergenerational relations. They are also Trustee for LGBT Unity, a Glasgow based support organisation for LGBTQ+ people of refugee, asylum seeker and migrant backgrounds.
The conversation was facilitated by Tomiwa Folorunso, who is a Nigerian-Scottish writer, editor and creative producer based between Brussels and Edinburgh. She has a special interest in Black-Scottish histories and contemporary stories in film and literature. Tomiwa is currently a programmer for Glasgow Film Festival, publication coordinator with the International Film Festival of Rotterdam, and is the executive producer for maud. (2022), a short film about Scottish-Ghanaian artist Maud Sulter. She also writes a monthly(ish) newsletter, DEAR LEXI.
This event was part of the Race, Rights & Sovereignty Caring Between Practices strand. Caring Between Practices is a programme strand inviting artists and practitioners working at the intersections of healing and creative practices. The series aims to consider what an embodied approach to making might look like within our own practices, and how we care for ourselves and each other within the creative process.
The Race, Rights & Sovereignty series is a free programme of public lectures, workshops and other events delivered by The Glasgow School of Art and The Art School: GSA's Students' Association.
A recording of the conversation is available upon request: racerightssovereignty@gsa.ac.uk
Image (above): hologram 10.7, (2021), credit Paradax Period
Friday 20 January 2023
10:30 - 12:00
Fleming House, 164 Renfrew Street
The workshop was an opportunity to play with the shape, texture and feeling of words alongside thinking about how these elements can (and can’t) inform shared meaning. Sometimes we try to communicate things which we don’t have the words for. Drawing words can open up alternative spaces and ways of communicating what can’t be said.
Zoë lead in demonstrating a variety of methods which can be used to build shapes and structures with clay. From this, participants explored their own ways of working with this active material.
Zoë Zo, Zoë Tumika & Zoë Guthrie is an artist from and living in Glasgow, Scotland.
Zoë makes work about being, in the many ways they imagine being can be for them. In their practice, making work and producing the work of others is a site to
breathe,
reconfigure,
unclog,
play,
be (a)live,
be unfixed.
A space which tightly embraces abundance and multiplicity.
Since 2021, Zoë has worked predominantly with clay and makes ceramics using handbuilding techniques as well as wheel throwing. They also make using pen (lettering and drawing) and film.
Zoë is currently Producer at Body Remedy, a Glasgow-based [forming] ecology that centres physical practice for self-recovery. Contributors and participants of Body Remedy are black people and people of colour (BPOC) who identify as women and non-binary.
This workshop was part of the Race, Rights & Sovereignty Caring Between Practices strand. Caring Between Practices is a programme strand inviting artists and practitioners working at the intersections of healing and creative practices. The series aims to consider what an embodied approach to making might look like within our own practices, and how we care for ourselves and each other within the creative process.
Letter Drawing with Clay, workshop led by Zoë Tumika
Image (above): ‘THER THER THER’ (2017), Zoë Zo, Zoë Tumika & Zoë Guthrie
Hussein Mitha, “Europe is a garden”: the border and ecological crisis
Tuesday 8 November 2022
17:30 - 19:00
The Assembly Hall, GSASA
In a recent speech, an EU foreign affairs chief described Europe as a garden and the rest of the world as a jungle, articulating a logic of how western elites perceive and shape the geography of the climate crisis, justifying genocide as easily as demarcating and maintaining a garden.
This talk and conversation by artist and writer Hussein Mitha explored the concept of paradise, (paradise for whom?) amid devastation and ecological crises in the Global South and a strengthening of racist border regimes across the Global North.
Drawing on work and research developed during a recent residency around climate justice and education at Deveron Projects in Aberdeenshire, Hussein advocated the idea that the climate justice movement must be grounded in a celebration of human and non-human flourishing, a shattering of the border in solidarity, and a transformation of the garden into a forest. They shared some work by artists and writers that will feature in a forthcoming handbook for young climate activists they are producing with Deveron Projects, entitled Paradise Now!
Emma Lewis-Jones hosted the in conversation. Emma is an artist working in the realm of performance-making whose work draws on feminism, sexuality, climate justice, grief and the border crisis. Emma graduated from MLitt Fine Art Practice at GSA in 2022. Throughout the event there were opportunities for audience to share thoughts, questions and comments.
Hussein Mitha is a writer and artist living in Glasgow. Their work often deals with racial capitalism, anti-imperialism and contemporary art. In their free time they like to walk, study literature, make floral paintings and do vegetal doodlings.
Image (above): 'The gates of paradise are barred to us’, 2nd November 2021, Hussein Mitha, Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh, photograph taken with Alaya Ang
Furmaan Ahmed In Conversation with Myriam Mouflih
Thursday 22 September
17:30 - 19:00
The Assembly Hall, GSASA
We were delighted to welcome artist, image maker, director and set designer, Furmaan Ahmed in conversation with curator Myriam Mouflih for the first Race, Rights & Sovereignty event of the 2022/2023 academic year.
Myriam Mouflih programmed Furmaan Ahmed’s first ever show at Govanhill Baths Community Trust in 2014, and together they worked with Willow Smith in 2019. Their informal conversation took us through some of the highlights of Furmaan’s remarkable professional journey and spoke to the vibrancy and value of collaboration, community, and connection within their practice.
Furmaan Ahmed (1995) is a multi-disciplinary artist from Glasgow who creates images, set designs and live installations that span across the worlds of fine art, fashion and film. In their collaborative practice, Furmaan has envisioned worlds and campaigns with WeTransfer, Willow Smith, Tate Modern, Sadler Wells, V&A Dundee, Jupiter Artland, Hermès, Adidas, SOPHIE, Sasha Velour and David Lachapelle.
Furmaan is interested in world building through the lens of a brown and trans person, creating sites that act as “emotional knowledge exchanges” for queer POC and trans bodies. Referencing ancient places, sci fi nature and hybrid futurism - they create experiences that feel like glitches in reality. Furmaan is a recent graduate of Fine Art from Central Saint Martins. In 2017 they were the recipient of the Robertsons Scholarship and were awarded the British Fashion Council New Waves Creatives Award 2021.
Myriam Mouflih is a film programmer, curator and occasional writer based in Glasgow, working across film and contemporary visual art. Myriam has programmed for festivals including Africa in Motion Film Festival (2017-2020) and Berwick Film and
Media Arts Festival and organisations such as South London Gallery, Pavilion (Leeds) and The Mosaic Rooms. Myriam was on the committee of Transmission Gallery from 2018-2020.
Image (right): Furmaan Ahmed photography by Kyle Crooks
This workshop was an invitation to explore the potential of listening practices to induce memory, create memory, transport the mind, repair and heal through sound. In a session of active listening, Zethu and participants shared audio that they relate to race, rights and sovereignty. Listening to some of Zethu’s sound works, they explored the potential to repair relationships to the land through explorations in sounds, field recording and listening practices. Participants were invited to capture and create sounds for a collective sound log which will be available online in the future.
When rights and sovereignty are constantly challenged and racism exists, the need for healing is an ongoing process. Connecting with sound is standing your ground in the face of those challenges.
Zethu is an artist, researcher and cultural worker. Her cultural work has spanned across Southern Africa and the UK, taking the form of workshops, commissions, exhibitions and residencies. Her current practice uses tapestry and sound to explore contemporary myth, relationships to land, repairing, revisiting ancient tools for healing and creating moments of trance within her practice.
Through sound and experimental vocalisation, Zethu attempts to induce introspection, reflection and empathy. She uses a range of techniques in her tapestry practice, from weaving to tufting and natural dyeing.
Zethu is a Junior Fellow in Neurodiversity in the Art Department at Goldsmiths University and is currently being commissioned to create new works as a part of Landednes at Primary in Nottingham, collaborating with South Africa based collective MadeYouLook. She was a part of the New Contemporaries Cohort 2020 and was awarded The Nicholas Tooth Travelling Scholarship on graduating from Goldsmiths University with a First Class Honours.
Tuesday 2 August 2022
14:30 - 16:30
Woodlands Community Garden Meeting Room
Sovereignty in Sound - Listening to remember
Zethu Maseko
Listening with the Body: A Walking Workshop
Ashanti Harris
Thursday 16 June 2022
14:00 - 16:00
Glasgow Women's Library & Glasgow Green
A movement workshop which took place partly indoors at Glasgow Women's Library and partly while listening to audio and walking outdoors in Glasgow Green.
This workshop was an invitation to explore and redefine our relationship to our bodies and the environments we move through. The workshop began at Glasgow Women’s Library with a series of warm up and body awareness exercises. We then moved outdoors on an audio guided walk which offered a series of movement provocations considering the many layers of narratives which intersect and overlap with our own experiences. We were encouraged to follow feeling rather than any kind of style or technique, moving towards an understanding of the body as an archive of memory, experience, knowledge and a tool for listening to our surroundings.
The audio recordings have been made available for a few weeks for you to listen again, or take part from your own location. Visit Ashanti Harris' Soundcloud for more information or to listen.
Ashanti Harris is a multi-disciplinary artist and researcher based in Glasgow. Working with dance, performance, facilitation, film, installation and writing, Ashanti’s work disrupts historical narratives and reimagines them from a Caribbean diasporic perspective. As part of her creative practice, she is co-director of the dance company Project X - platforming dance of the African and Caribbean diaspora in Scotland; and works collaboratively as part of the collective Glasgow Open Dance School (G.O.D.S) – facilitating experimental movement workshops and research groups. She is also lecturer in Contemporary Performance at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and co-facilitates the British Art Network research group The Re-Action of Black Performance.
This workshop was part of the Race, Rights & Sovereignty Caring Between Practices strand. Caring Between Practices centres artists who are working at the intersections of art and holistic healing practice. Through this, thinking about how artists can use these practices to care for themselves and communities.
Image (Top): An Exercise In Exorcism, group performance, Ashanti Harris, 2021
Workshop
In the Darkness, New Life Emerges:
A Writing Workshop
Martha Adonai Williams
Tuesday 3 May 2022
14:30 - 16:30
Woodlands Community Garden
The archetype of 'the shadow' represents the energy of the dark side, the unexpressed, the unrealised, the rejected. Yet all around us we can witness a different truth about the dark that can shift our perspective to the 'not yet' expressed, realised and welcomed.
Think about a seed nestled in fresh compost, its coat cracking open in the moisture, releasing roots into the depths below. In the darkness, new life emerges, creation happens; under the soil, in the womb, in a dream state.
In this writing workshop, we embraced the idea of the dark as an emergent dream space, as fertile ground, exploring how we can write from our dark places, and get to know our dark places, perceiving these hidden or forgotten selves not as shameful or scary but as warrens of protection, potential, and creative power.
Surrounded by the abundance of the garden as a symbol of the flourishing that starts in the dark, we engaged in writing and sensory exercises, conversation and sharing. All activities were an invitation to participate in what feels useful. There were opportunities to share your thoughts and work.
Martha Adonai Williams is a writer, facilitator, black feminist and friend. Her practice departs to and returns from black feminist world-making, always, with regular layovers in front of trash tv or at the allotment. Her work considers the wilderness and margins as sites of resistance, refusal and homecoming. She works with writing and storytelling as therapeutic tools and as methods for community building.
FURTHER READING
The Creative Connection: Expressive Arts as Healing, Natalie Rogers
Retelling the Stories of our Lives: Everyday Narrative Therapy to Draw
Inspiration and Transform Experience, David Denborough
Bone, Yrsa Daley-Ward
This workshop was part of the Race, Rights & Sovereignty Caring Between Practices strand. Caring Between Practices centres artists who are working at the intersections of art and holistic healing practice. Through this, thinking about how artists can use these practices to care for themselves and communities.
Image (Top): Seed, Roger Evans
‘Participatory history as Restorative history: Mapping the history of British colonial camps in Kenya’
Chao Tayiana Maina
Tuesday 23 November 2021
16:00 - 17:00
Online
Race, Rights & Sovereignty were delighted to welcome Chao Tayiana Maina to The Glasgow School of Art to deliver an online lecture ‘Participatory history as Restorative history: Mapping the history of British colonial camps in Kenya’. This event was chaired by Dr Ranjana Thapalyal.
This lecture explored the healing and restorative aspects of participatory work through the experience of the Museum of British Colonialism (MBC) team members in Kenya. For 4 years MBC has been documenting the sites and structures of detention camps set up by the British colonial government during the state of emergency (1952 - 1960).
Today, some physical remains of these camps are present in Kenya. Since independence in 1963, however, little has been done to preserve and understand this era. Children are educated in classrooms that were once detention cells and torture chambers but have no idea about this history. Memory of these detention camps has also been systemically erased through the British colonial government’s program - ‘Operation Legacy’ - which saw the deliberate destruction of archival records to conceal this past.
Documenting and preserving the memory of these centres is not only important in raising historical awareness it is also a reclamation of narrative and a chance to come to terms with open wounds that are at the core of Kenya's national identity.
Chao Tayiana Maina is a Kenyan digital heritage specialist and digital humanities scholar working at the intersection of culture and technology. Her work primarily focuses on the application of technology in the preservation, engagement and dissemination of African heritage. She is the founder of African Digital Heritage, a co-founder of the Museum of British Colonialism and a co-founder of the Open Restitution Africa project. She holds an MSc International Heritage Visualisation (distinction) and a BSc Mathematics and Computer Science. Her research work explored the possibilities of embedding intangible histories in 3D digital environments. She is a recipient of the Google Anita Borg scholarship for women in technology.
Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Reuters, BBC news, BBC Arts, Ntv, KBC and 3Sat.
Dr. Ranjana Thapalyal is an Indian born inter-disciplinary artist and academic based in Scotland. Her practice spans ceramics, painting, and ephemeral mixed media. Research areas include materiality, cultural and social identity, and the metaphysical self in relation to all of these. Of particular interest are concepts of self in South Asian and West African traditions, feminist readings of ancient philosophies of the global South, cultural politics, and the development of decolonising, inter-disciplinary and inter-cultural strategies for art pedagogy and social and environmental harmony. Thapalyal's book, Education as Mutual Translation, a Yoruba and Ancient Indian Interface for Pedagogy in the Creative Arts (Brill 2018), proposes an adaptive, student led pedagogy premised on critical aspects of Yoruba and Vedantic thought, sensitive to history and student contexts. Other recent writing can be found in Art Monthly, MAP, and Panel publications.
Image (Top): ‘Digital Visualisation of a detention camp in Kenya, Aguthi Works Camp’, (2019). Photo credit: Museum of British Colonialism
Lecture & Seminar
Strategies of Ecological Witnessing
Imani Jacqueline Brown
Lecture: 24 May 2021
Seminar: 25 May 2021
For our final event of the 20/21 academic year we welcomed Imani Jacqueline Brown to The Glasgow School of Art to deliver an online lecture and accompanying seminar considering her research into environmental racism in Louisiana.
‘Deep Implicancy’
Professor Denise Ferreira da Silva
Wednesday 17 November 2021
19:00-20:00
Online
For the first rescheduled event of the academic year, Race, Rights & Sovereignty were delighted to welcome Professor Denise Ferreira da Silva to The Glasgow School of Art to deliver an online lecture. The lecture was chaired by Professor Johnny Rodger (GSA).
Ferreira da Silva states: ‘In this presentation, I introduce an expanded description of the notion of deep implicancy. I do so by connecting it to the related notion of corpus infinitum (body without limits), which is the image of existence that enables the acknowledgement of this and other levels of entanglement. I will illustrate deep implicancy with commentary on soft art projects and through a discussion of arguments around the causes of climate change.’
Professor Denise Ferreira da Silva is Director of The Social Justice Institute (the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice) at the University of British Columbia. An academic and practicing artist, Dr. Denise Ferreira da Silva’s work addresses the ethico-political challenges of the global present. She is the author of ‘Toward a Global Idea of Race’ (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), ‘A Dívida Impagavel’ (Oficina da Imaginaçāo Política and Living Commons, 2019), ‘Unpayable Debt’ (Stenberg/MIT Press, forthcoming) and co-editor (with Paula Chakravartty) of ‘Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime’ (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). She has exhibited and lectured at major art venues, such as the Pompidou Center (Paris), Whitechapel Gallery (London, MASP (Sāo Paulo), Guggenheim (New York), and MoMa (New York). In 2021, ‘Soot Breath // Corpus Infinitum’ was a newly commissioned film and installation by Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva, which showed as part of Glasgow International at CCA Glasgow.
Johnny Rodger is a writer and critic and Professor of Urban Literature in the Mackintosh School of Architecture at the Glasgow School of Art. He is co-founding editor of The Drouth. His latest book, ‘Key Essays: Mapping the Contemporary in Literature and Culture’ includes a chapter on Denise Ferreira da Silva and was published by Routledge in September 2021. https://www.routledge.com/Key-Essays-Mapping-the-Contemporary-in-Literature-and-Culture/Rodger/p/book/9781032001524
Image (Top): ‘4Waters/Deep Implicancy’ (2018) Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira Da Silva
What does it mean for Black people to fight for the rights of nature while we are still fighting for our basic human rights? How can a practice of exposing the segregative fissures driven through existence hold space for humble rituals of repair?
In this lecture and seminar, Imani discussed her investigations into environmental racism in Louisiana through a carefully cultivated research praxis incorporating: counter-forensics (combining innovative technology and grassroots wisdom to investigate state and corporate crime), cartographic unraveling (tracing lines of accountability through corporate succession), and autonomic research (a hybrid practice of remote and intimate sensing through the experience of being in and becoming place).
Imani Jacqueline Brown is an artist, activist, researcher, and writer from New Orleans. Her work investigates the continuum of Extractivism, which spans from colonial genocide and slavery to Cancer Alley, coastal erosion, and climate change.
In exposing the layers of violence and resistance that structure US society, Imani frees up space to imagine a path to ecological reparations. Among other things, Imani is currently a researcher with Forensic Architecture.
Image (Top): Imani Jacqueline Brown, Oil access canals and marsh restoration in the Lafitte Oil Field, Jefferson Parish, Lousisiana, 2019.
Flight courtesy of SouthWings and HealthyGulf.
Image (Bottom): Imani Jacqueline Brown, Old Gods, 2021. Framed and reflected chart of permits for coastal development, including oil and gas wells, flowlines, pipelines, and access canals in Quarantine Bay, Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana (1920-2020), mapped against antebellum Public Land Survey System (PLSS) charts (1820s-1860s). The PLSS was the first US system to plat, or divide, territory into parcels of private property.
Talk
CURATE-WRITE-REFLECT-WRITE-CURATE-REFLECT-CURATE-REFLECT-WRITE
Prof. Carol Tulloch
Tuesday 27th April 2021
Curating and writing are key
thinking and making practices for me.
I rely on their interdependence.
They contribute to my sense of self.
Objects and the right to be are the drivers.
How did I get here?
Race, Rights & Sovereignty collaborated with GSA's Department of Design, History and Theory to welcome Professor Carol Tulloch to The Glasgow School of Art.
Professor Tulloch is a writer, curator and Professor of Dress, Diaspora and Transnationalism at the University of the Arts London based at Chelsea College of Arts. She is also an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Her recent work includes ‘Style Activism: The Everyday Activist Wardrobe of the Black Panther Party and Rock Against Racism Movement' in Fashion and Politics (2019), co-editor of The Persistence of Taste: Art, Museums and Everyday life After Bourdieu (2018), the exhibition Jessica Ogden: Still (2017), the monograph The Birth of Cool: Style Narratives of the African Diaspora (2016), the book and exhibition Syd Shelton: Rock Against Racism (2015).
A Riot of Our Own Exhibition, CHELSEA Space, London, 1 July–2 August 2008, Image Courtesy C. Tulloch
Talk
Digital Colonialism:
The Threat of Neutrality
Libby Odai
28 January 2021
Online via Zoom
Technology is often touted as a “neutral tool” but how does this “neutrality” become a form of oppression?
This lecture by Libby Odai, offered audiences an introduction the history and manifestations of digital colonisation, its future and digital resistance.
From guns to AI, missionaries to influencers, phrenology to facial recognition. Looking at the “Tools of Empire”, Libby Odai linked the methods of colonial past to the present, exploring the techonological advancements and their relationship and role in the neocolonial digital presents.
Image courtesy Libby Odai
Seminar
Decolonising the
Digital Self
Libby Odai
2 February 2021
Online via Zoom
This seminar provided an opportunity to unpack and discuss ideas explored in the lecture Digital Colonialism: the threat of neutrality. Participants explored strategies for decolonising our digital selves through informal group discussion and an introduction to subversive techniques that can aid in decolonising digital diets.
Libby Odai is a creative technologist based in Glasgow, developing and producing digital sculpture and performance with digital elements. She has previously produced digital works shown at Dancebase Edinburgh, The University of Edinburgh, Plat:form and the Swap Market in Govanhill.
Her work focuses on bringing digital concepts into the physical world. By breaking down barriers in technology, blending traditional arts such as dance and crochet with high tech components, she brings tech to new more diverse audiences. Her work aims to bridge the STEM gap as well as exploring the creative applications of new technology.
Lecture
Knocking on the Door: Complaints and Other Stories about Institutions
Sara Ahmed
16 February 2021
In this lecture, Sara Ahmed shared some stories of making complaints about abuses of power at universities. She showed how complaints can bring so much about institutions into view. The lecture attended to how and why doors come up in stories about making complaints. It concluded with a consideration of the work of "complaint collectives" and how, by complaining, we can keep "knocking on the door" of institutions not in order to demand entry, but to cause disturbance.
Sara Ahmed is an independent feminist scholar and writer. Her work is concerned with how power is experienced and challenged in everyday life and institutional cultures. Her book Complaint! is forthcoming with Duke University Press in September 2021. Her previous publications include What's the Use: On the Uses of Use (2019); Living a Feminist Life (2017), Willful Subjects (2014), On Being Included (2012), The Promise of Happiness (2010), Queer Phenomenology (2006), The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2014, 2004), Strange Encounters (2000) and Differences that Matter (1998).
Image courtesy Sara Ahmed
Performance Lecture + Discussion
Afrofuturism and Spacial Practices
UMBILIC, 2020 (work in progress), 3D Object, courtesy Natasha Ruwona
Natasha Ruwona
Wednesday 16th September 2020,
17:00 - 18:30
Online via Zoom
Race, Rights and Sovereignty welcomed
Natasha Thembiso Ruwona to present a new chapter of their ongoing research Afrofuturism + Spatial Practices that employs Afro-Futurism as a tool for exploring and imagining the formation of new worlds. Originally created for Rhubaba Gallery & Studio’s No School! program, Natasha has further developed the performance lecture and this iteration will feature reflections that consider music, sound and technology as being a part of Black geographical landscapes, while exploring dreams and what it means to be a myth.
The performance lecture was followed by a group discussion led by Natasha in which participants had the opportunity to collectively engage with the themes of the performance and consider provocations that aimed to unearth potential links within participants’ own practices.
Natasha Thembiso Ruwona is a Scottish-Zimbabwean artist, researcher and curator. Natasha’s artistic practice is research based and investigates racialised spatialisation (in line with Black Feminist Geographies) via the processes of writing, digital art and performance.
Natasha completed a curatorship for Africa in Motion Film Festival 2019 and was Film Hub Scotland's New Promoter for Glasgow Short Film Festival. They are a Project Coordinator for the collective UncoverED, based at The University of Edinburgh - a student-led project researching into the global and imperial history of the university and how this relates to the current ways in which the university as an institutional space oppresses BIPOC. Natasha is also an Assistant Producer for movement researcher Claricia Parinussa and a Committee Member at Rhubaba Gallery & Studios.
This event took place as part of Freshers Week 2020: Digital Edition
Artist Talk
Tako Taal
Thursday 10th Septemer,
16:00 - 17:00
Online via Zoom
At stake in Taal's artistic practice are the psychic structures of colonial relations, and the question of how vivid they remain in the present. She was a 2019 RAW Academy fellow at RAW Material Company, Dakar and a Committee Member at Market Gallery, Glasgow, 2016-18. Recent screenings and exhibitions include, Tramway TV, Glasgow Short Film Festival, Glasgow Women's Library, Grand Union, (Birmingham) Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival and LUX (London.) She lives in Glasgow.
For our first event of the academic year, we presented a talk by artist, filmmaker and programmer Tako Taal, who is currently a resident at Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh.
Residue, slide film, 2018, image courtesy Tako Taal.
This event took place as part of Freshers Week 2020: Digital Edition.
Talk
The Beauty of Islamic Geometric Design
Dhiman Sengupta
Monday 2nd December 2019,
18:30 - 19:30
Club Room, CCA Glasgow,
350 Sauchiehall Street, G2 3JD
Race, Rights and Sovereignty presented a talk by Dhiman Sengupta who was visiting Glasgow from the National Institute of Design (NID), India as part of an Erasmus+ Programme. Dhiman is a faculty member in the Communication Design department at NID.
This talk was an introduction to the world of Islamic Geometric Design, and will outline some of the underlying geometry and symmetry principles which have been used for centuries by craftsmen and designers in the Islamic tradition to create a plethora of designs of exquisite beauty and workmanship. It broke down and analysed some of the common designs found in this tradition in terms of basic geometric shapes and then re-created designs in a step-by-step manner to demonstrate how such a design can be created from scratch. The intention was to encourage attendees to look and seek out such designs with renewed interest and understanding.
Dhiman Sengupta graduated from NID in 1999 in the stream of Animation Film Design. He has worked in Mumbai and Delhi, for a decade in the areas of e-learning, broadcast and motion graphics, and visual effects. Dhiman has been teaching for a decade in the Animation Film Design department; he has been the Discipline Lead for the last 5 years.
Dhiman is a music, comic book, geometry, origami and film enthusiast. Among the courses taught by him are Storyboarding, Comic Book, Time & Image, Sound Design, Music Appreciation and Geometric Construction for the Design Foundation Programme.
He is a voracious reader, poet, musician, artist, and illustrator. Dhiman loves sketching people and architecture; his sketchbook is his constant companion. He is fascinated by Islamic Geometric Design and its manifestations through History which he attempts to share and teach through his Geometry lectures.
Screening
Mother I’m Suffocating, This is My Last Film About You
Dir: Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese
English and Hebrew with English subtitles | 1h16m | 15
Monday 28th October 2019,
18:00 - 20:00
Reid Auditorium, The Glasgow School of Art
167 Renfrew St, Glasgow, G3 6RQ
Free, but ticketed.
See Africa In Motion website to book.
Africa In Motion Film Festival 2019 present this experimental essay film which traces a narrative of migration by a filmmaker in exile, showing a stark snapshot of life on the African continent. Beautifully shot entirely in black and white, Mosese uses powerful close-ups to portray the memories of a generation of people in Lesotho. This poetic voyage traverses between politics, identity and collective memory as a woman bearing a wooden cross on her back sets the trail for a fierce lamentation. The film is a bid of farewell to his homeland, infused with love and rage and exploring the complexities of leaving a place you have called home.
Lecture
Lisandro Suriel | Ghost Island: Exploring Decolonial Imagination
Wednesday 23rd October 2019,
12:30 - 14:30
CCA Cinema, 350 Sauchiehall St G2 3JD
“Who am I? Where do I come from? Where does my story begin? I find myself marooned on an island in a state of amnesia. Here, the only thing I can remember is that I am Black.”
Tilting Axis 2019/20 fellowship recipient, artist Lisandro Suriel welcomed audiences to Ghost Island, an ongoing project exploring the relationship between imagination and decolonization. Ghost Island came to be when the Ethiopian sea changed its name to the Atlantic Ocean and displaced a plethora of memories. Lisandro Suriel is a photographer, born and raised in Saint Martin, an island in the Dutch Caribbean, whose work responds to magic surrealism, fiction and dreamscapes. Initially studying at the Academy of Art in The Hague, he received his Masters in Artistic Research and Art Studies from the University of Amsterdam, with his graduate thesis analysing early 20th-century illustrations of Caribbean mythology in relation to cultural aphasia.
Offering up a much-needed subaltern perspective on postcoloniality and deconstructing the Black imagination, Suriel challenges orthodox institutions of knowing that perpetuate a hegemonic paradigm. What does it mean to decolonize? And where do we begin?
This event was presented as part of The Tilting Axis Fellowship in collaboration with the Race, Rights & Sovereignty Series.
The Tilting Axis Fellowship is a direct outcome of the Tilting Axis meetings in 2015 at Fresh Milk in Barbados, in 2016 at the Pérez Art Museum Miami and in 2017 at The National Gallery of the Cayman Islands, and follows on from the inagural fellowship in 2017 awarded to Jamaican curator Nicole Smythe-Johnson. For its 2019 iteration, Scotland based cultural partners including the Glasgow School of Art, The School of Art History at the University of St Andrews, CCA Glasgow, LUX Scotland, Hospitalfield, the British Council, and curatorial duo Mother Tongue came together to offer a research fellowship in Scotland for an emerging contemporary art practitioner living and working in the Caribbean to share knowledge around current approaches towards commissioning and collecting in the arts. This Fellowship focuses on the development of pragmatic and critical curatorial and artistic practice hailing from the Caribbean region and is research and practice-led, and mentor-based. Selected recipient Lisandro Suriel will spend the month of October between Glasgow, Dundee, St. Andrews and Edinburgh.
Image courtesy Lisandro Suriel
Video Still, Larry Achiampong, The Expulsion, Single Channel 4K Video with Stereo Sound, 2019
A lecture by artist Larry Achiampong presented in collaboration with The Gallow Gate, Glasgow and supported by GSA's Department of Design, History and Theory.
Larry Achiampong's solo and collaborative projects employ imagery, aural and visual archives, live performance and sound to explore ideas surrounding class, cross-cultural and post-digital identity.
With works that examine his communal and personal heritage – in particular, the intersection between pop culture and the postcolonial position, Achiampong crate-digs the vaults of history. These investigations examine constructions of ‘the self’ by splicing the audible and visual materials of personal and interpersonal archives, offering multiple perspectives that reveal entrenched socio-political contradictions in contemporary society.
In this lecture, Achiampong retraced his work to date with a particular focus on the process and development of his most recent work, 'The Expulsion', which was a solo presentation at The Gallow Gate in Glasgow.
Commissioned by The Gallow Gate, the work highlights the rich interior world of an unnamed migrant with references to themes of race, class and gender. Achiampong invokes the energy and memories of a pre-gentrified 1990s east London; weaving testimonies and daydreams with the monotonous rhythms of physical labour and the weight of frustrating consumerist aspirations in the city's West End.
Achiampong guides us through to a shadow world of “invisible” workers by transmuting the common acts of cleaning and maintenance into something that has the power of the rituals of prayer or a sequence of launch codes. Each repetition evokes an attempt to reach apotheosis, to leave the loop or at the least; shake off the signifiers of difference and poverty.
In partnership with GSA Library, a number of books and texts selected by Larry Achiampong, The Gallow Gate and GSA Staff, were displayed in the GSA library foyer, available for students and staff to read and borrow.
'The Expulsion' by Larry Achiampong ran until Sunday 29 September 2019 at The Gallow Gate (Many Studios, 3 Ross Street, Glasgow, G1 5AR).
https://www.thegallowgate.art/the-expulsion
Lecture
Larry Achiampong
Thursday 26th September 2019,
18:00 - 20:00
Reid Auditorium, The Glasgow School of Art
167 Renfrew St, Glasgow, G3 6RQ
Workshop
Cooking Pot:
Khichdi / Kedgeree: Part II
Wednesday, 26th June 2019,
12:30 - 14:30
CCA Clubroom, Centre for Contemporary Art, 350 Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow, G2 3JD
Race, Rights and Sovereignty in partnership with CCA Cooking Pot, presented a demo-led cookery class, followed by a hands on cookery section with a talk and conversation throughout.
This was the final event in the two-part Khichdi / Kedgeree: Food Culture inTransnational Identities series, that explores the role food, food cultures and heritage ingredients play in transnational identity formation. This session took the form of a cookery class led by Sumayya Usmani, through which the preparation of a variety of dishes, was used to ignite collective conversations around food cultures, exchange, complex histories and how they impact cuisines and shape relationships to food. Usmani’s focus was the migratory nature of ingredients and dishes.
Kaleyard Image courtesy: Sumayya Usmani
Sumayya Usmani is a food writer and cookery teacher who grew up in Pakistan, she moved to London in 2006, where she lived for ten years ago. Sumayya quit her twelve year City law career to follow her passion for sharing the flavours of her homeland with a view to highlight Pakistani cuisine as a distinct one. The author or two award-winning and award nominated cookbooks: Summers Under The Tamarind Tree (Frances Lincoln 2016) and Mountain Berries and Dessert Spice (Frances Lincoln 2017), her writing reminisces about food and memories growing up in Pakistan and Sumayya advocates cooking by "andaza", (sensory and estimation cooking), which is how she learnt to cook from her mother and grandmothers; from a very young age.
Sumayya has worked with some of the biggest names in the food world, including Madhur Jaffrey, Sophie Grigson, Rachel Allen and Vivek Singh. She appeared in many print magazines like Delicious, Olive, BBC Good Food (naming her the go-to expert in Pakistani food), Saveur, New York Times, Food 52, Telegraph and has also done a residency for four weeks for The Guardian Cook supplement. Sumayya has been on Good Food Channel (with Madhur Jaffrey), BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour and Saturday Live, as well as BBC Radio 2, BBC Asian Network and BBC Worldwide. Sumayya is soon to appear on BBC Radio 4's Kitchen Cabinet panel with Jay Rayner in April 2018. Sumayya had appeared in some of the world's top literary festivals as well as Ballymaloe, River Cottage and dome demos at Borough Market. Sumayya also hosts many pop-up events and supper clubs and has worked with top restaurants in the UK.
Sumayya is an experienced cookery teacher who has been teaching for over five years at Divertimenti London, Demuths Bath, Oxford's Jericho Kitchen, Sophie Grigson's, Edinburgh New Town Cookery School and many others. Sumayya is the founder of 'Kaleyard: Cook-Eat-Share', in Glasgow, a social enterprise cook school and community cafe project that aims to bring people together irrespective of who they are and get them cooking good food from scratch, while sharing stories, recipes and celebrating the power of togetherness that food is all about.
Reading Group
GSA Library Reading Group: Image Representation
Thursday, 9 May 2019, 17:30 - 19:30
Quiet Study Space, GSA Library
Race, Rights and Sovereignty, in partnership with the GSA Library, presents this series of three reading groups unocovering and examining a number of books in GSA's historical collections (mainly dating from the 19th century) that are written from paradigms that we would be critical of today, many with a colonial outlook. In these reading and discussion groups, we will explore and interrogate these selected texts collectively in order to deconstruct and consider how we can engage with these texts today, and where they are situated within contemporary libraries and archive holdings.
In this first reading group, we will examine the role of image representation in colonial texts and its impact on imaging in contemporary society. The following historical and contemporary works will be used as a starting point for the discussion:
Edy-Legrand (1919): Macao et Cosmage: ou l'Experience du Bonheur
This book for French children was published in November 1919, when Edouard Leon Louis Legrand (known as Edy-Legrand) was just 18. The book presents a very colonial view of territories in which life is depicted as invariably happy and tranquil.
Ethel Larcombe (c.1914): Lollypop Lays
Children's cloth-book featuring rhymes and songs illustrated by Ethel Larcombe (1876-1940).
Alexander Rowland (1853): The human hair, popularly and physiologically considered
Describes and classifies human hair according to several 19th century 'divisions of man'.
Kara Walker (1997): Freedom, a fable: a curious interpretation of the wit of a negress in troubled times.
Kara Walker, Freedom, a Fable: A Curious Interpretation of the Wit of a Negress in Troubled Times, 1997. Edition of 4000. Image courtesy of the GSA Library Special Collections.
Ghost ship off the south-eastern coast of Barbados, 2018. Image courtesy Dr S Ayesha Hameed
Performative Lecture
LUX Scotland Presents: Ayesha Hameed
Black Atlantis: Retrograde Futurism
23 April 2019, 18:30
The Assembly Hall, GSA Students' Association
On April 29, 2006, a twenty-foot boat was spotted off the south-eastern coast of Barbados. On board, eleven bodies were found by the coastguards, preserved and desiccated by the sun and salt water. The ghost ship was adrift for four months on the Atlantic Ocean. It set sail on Christmas day in Praia in the Cape Verde Islands, full of migrants from Senegal, Guinea Bissau, and Gambia, en route to the Canary Islands. Each of these men paid £890 for their place on the boat. Four months later, the boat was found on the coast of Barbados.
This is an 'inadequate telling' of this story that draws on the materials and tools at hand to make sense of the complicity of weather, ocean currents and state violence in the journey of this ship. Hovering between the film and the essay form is a questioning of the adequacy of the measuring of histories and affects connected to crossing, languages to make evident the materiality of the sea, and the both measurable and immeasurable horror contained in the figure of the ghost ship.
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Ayesha Hameed's moving image, performance and written work explore contemporary borders and migration, and visual cultures of the Black Atlantic. Her projects Black Atlantis and A Rough History (of the destruction of fingerprints) have been performed and exhibited internationally. She is the co-editor of Futures and Fictions (Repeater 2017), and is currently the Programme Leader for the MA in Contemporary Art Theory in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths University of London.
This event was delivered in partnership with LUX Scotland.
Lecture
School of Fine Art Friday Event
and Race, Rights and Sovereignty present:
Bisi Alimi
On Becoming a Black Gay Man in the UK
22 March 2019, 11:00
Glasgow Film Theatre
Harvey Dimond (visual artist, programmer, co-founder of the GSA POC Collective and third year Fine Art Photography student) programmed this lecture as part of the Race, Rights and Sovereignty series for the School of Fine Art Friday Event.
Bisi Alimi is an "Angelic Troublemaker Incarnate" - PASSIONATE and ENERGETIC public speaker, storyteller, television pundit, campaigner, actor and Vlogger.
His expertise on Social Justice ranges from Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity to Race and Race Relations, Feminism, Education and Poverty Alleviation. He has done a lot of work around "Intersexuality" and is currently on a global Intersectionality tour.
He has written many controversial opinion pieces including; “Men cant be Feminist”, “I am no longer talking to Black Africans about Race”, “Why It’s So Dangerous To Pretend That Racism Doesn’t Exist” and many others. “The Development Cost of Homophobia” is his most successful article that was translated into over 15 languages globally. Finally, His article for the Guardian: “If you say being gay is not African, you don’t know your history” has gone on to great review and cited in many news articles and journals globally.
His collection of poems includes: “a note to my father”, “The answer is always there”, and his published poem “I told them a tale”.
In 2004, he came out as gay on national television in Nigeria making him the first ever Nigeria LGBT person to do so.
Bisi Alimi was a visiting lecturer to both Freie University and Humboldt University both in Berlin where he was teaching “Pre and Post Colonial Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity in Africa”
He also serves on the board of Stonewall Housing, AllOut and None On Record.
He has appeared on international TV stations as a social and political pundit, including, CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera, and CCTV, and outlets like NPR and the Washington Post has profiled him.
His TEDx talk, “There should never be another Ibrahim” has been listed as one of the 14 most inspiring QUEER TEDtalk of all time. Alimi gave the closing speech at the Daily Beast event hosted at the New York Public Library titled, “I am Bisi Alimi and I am not a victim.”
He is currently working on his memoir “The Boy from Mushin” with a full length film launching next year.
He consulted for World Bank on Economic impact of Homophobia and served on the Bank advisory board on SOGI. He is a fellow of Salzburg Global LGBT Forum and New Voices at the Aspen Institute.
He was second runner-up for Campaigner of the Year at the European Diversity Award 2016, a shortlist for Diversity Role Model- LGBT for the National Diversity awards in 2015 and 2017 and a shortlist for Roberta Cowell Gay Times Honour.
Listed 19 most important LGBT person in UK 2015 and was number 68 on the World Pride Power List 2017.
He is the founder and Director of Bisi Alimi Foundation. In 2005, he founded The Initiative for Equal Rights and in 2012, was a founding member of Kaleidoscope Trust in the UK.
He lives in London with his husband.
Image courtesy Bisi Alimi.
Seminar + Workshops
March 14 2019, 13:00-18:00
Kinning Park Complex
Throughout this full-day set of discussions and workshops, we looked at how food, food culture and heritage ingredients play a role in transnational identities. The event toke place at Kinning Park Complex, a community hub in the Southside of Glasgow. The day began with a discussion around notions of identity, and how food culture shapes, preserves or communicates these ideas, as well as getting to know the individual practitioners and how they negotiate these ideas through their various practices.
The initial introduction was followed by a breakout into smaller workshops, where there were opportunities to explore these ideas further in hands-on workshops.
The day culminated with a screening of the short film Saffron (2018, Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead) before the start of the regular Thursday Night Community Meal which takes place at Kinning Park Complex.
Panel included: Gabby Cluness from Milk Café, artist Sulaïman Majali, Julie Lin MacLeod from Julie's Kopitiam and product designer Fernando Laposse.
Participants will be more than welcome to stay for the Community Meal from 18:00 onwards and operates on a pay-what-you-want scheme. For more info click here.
Workshops, 15:00-17:00:
Workshop with Sulaïman Majali
Limited to 10 places
Cooking Workshop with Julie Lin MacLeod of Julie's Kopitiam
Limited to 15 places
Learn to make tortillas with Fernando Laposse
Limited to 12 places
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Schedule
13:00: Doors open
13:15: Intro to panel
13:30-14:30: Panel: Sulaïman Majali, Julie Lin MacLeod, Fernando Laposse, Gabby Cluness
14:30-15:00: Coffee/tea break
15:00-17:00: Workshops (advance sign-up required)
17:30: Workshops finish
17:45: Screening of Saffron
18:00: Community meal begins
This event was delivered in partnership with:
Kinning Park Complex, CCA The Cooking Pot, LUX Scotland
a thousand nights and a night (or arab nude), 2017, Sulaïman Majali, courtesy of the artist
Image courtesy Bisi Alimi.
Workshop
We are the spirits that walk amongst you (sorry not sorry)
Alberta Whittle
14 September 2018
Glasgow Autonomous Space
We are the spirits who walk amongst you (sorry not sorry) was a workshop by Alberta Whittle as part of Glasgow School Art's Freshers' Week programme and the GSA Race, Rights and Sovereignty series (RRS).
The workshop looked at how we understand individualised and collective humxnity. Through engaging with truth telling as a form of truth talking, the workshop participants looked at how perceptions of history can impact our ability for empathy as a radical decolonial practice.
Alberta Whittle is a Committee member of Transmission Gallery and a Board Member at SCAN (Scottish Visual Arts Network).
'We are the spirits that walk amongst you (sorry not sorry)', Alberta Whittle.
Workshop
Workshop with Mele Broomes
11 September 2018
The Glue Factory
Twist and turn. Lengthen and strengthen. Flex and float. Whine and wave your body. In this workshop, Mele Broomes invited participants to a physical rhythmic exploration through her diasporic movement journey. The workshop asked the participants to challenge themselves personally and listen to their bodies.
The workshop was part of the Freshers' Week programme.
Mele Broomes is an artist based in Glasgow. Broomes’ work experiments with the extremities of movement and voice whilst investigating her current contemporary practice of African Diasporic dance.
Mele is also one of the lead artists for Project X, Scotland.