Past Events

marikiscrycrycry, $ELFIE$ at Fierce, 2017, photo by Manuel Vason

I AM NOT A NATION-STATE
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson in conversation with Nat Raha

3 – 4.30pm Wednesday 13th November 2024
Bourdon Lecture Theatre (Second Floor), GSA Bourdon Building
Scott Street, Glasgow G3 6RQ
Free but ticketed – Book via Eventbrite

Join us from 3pm on Wednesday 13th November for I AM NOT A NATION STATE, a special in conversation event with Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Nat Raha.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is widely recognized as one of the most compelling Indigenous voices of her generation. Her writing, grounded in Nishnaabeg “poetic knowledge”, explores how to build Indigenous resistance movements that refuse the destructive thinking of settler colonialism. She locates Indigenous political resurgence as a practice rooted in uniquely Indigenous theorizing, writing, organising, and thinking. She makes clear that the goal of Indigenous resistance can no longer be cultural resurgence as a mechanism for inclusion in a multicultural mosaic, and instead calls for unapologetic, place-based Indigenous alternatives to the destructive logics of the settler colonial state.

Venue
Bourdon Lecture Theatre (Second Floor)
GSA Bourdon Building, Scott Street, Glasgow G3 6RQ

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a renowned Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer and artist, who has been widely recognized as one of the most compelling Indigenous voices of her generation. Her work breaks open the intersections between politics, story and song—bringing audiences into a rich and layered world of sound, light, and sovereign creativity.

Leanne is the author of eight books, including A Short History of the Blockade and the novel Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies which was short listed for the Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction and the Dublin Literary Prize. This Accident of Being Lost was a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Trillium Book Award. Her new project, a collaboration with Robyn Maynard, Rehearsals for Living is a National Best Seller and was short listed for the Governor General’s Literary Award for non-fiction. Leanne is also a musician. Her latest release Theory of Ice was named to the Polaris Prize short list, and she is the 2021 winner of the Prism Prize’s Willie Dunn Award.

Working for two decades as an independent scholar using Nishnaabeg intellectual practices, Leanne has lectured and taught extensively at universities across Canada and the United States and has over twenty years experience with Indigenous land-based education. She holds a PhD from the University of Manitoba and is member of Alderville First Nation.

Dr Nat Raha is a poet and activist-scholar, and Lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies at the Glasgow School of Art. Her work is of an experimental queer lyric, attending to the everyday of marginalised lives, hirstories of struggle and resistance to racial capitalism, of humans and the more-than-human. She works through de/re/materialising sound, form and syntax, on the page and in performance. Her books of poetry include apparitions (nines) (Nightboat Books, 2024), of sirens, body & faultlines (Boiler House Press, 2018), and countersonnets (Contraband Books, 2013). Nat’s work is anthologised in 100 Queer Poems and We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics. Her poetry has been translated in numerous languages. Recent performances include epistolary (on carceral islands), co-commissioned by Edinburgh Art Festival, Scotland and TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, Galway, Ireland, 2023.

Recent critical writing appears in Queer Print in Europe, Transgender Marxism (Pluto Press, 2021), New Feminist Literary Studies (CUP, 2020) and Third Text (‘Imagining Queer Europe then and now’, 2021). With Mijke van der Drift, Nat is co-author of Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds (Pluto Press, 2024), co-editor of Radical Transfeminism zine, and co-author of the article ‘“They would plant the rose garden themselves”: Femmeness, Complicity, Solidarity’ in Social Text.

This event is co-hosted by Glasgow School of Art Fine Art Critical Studies Department and Race, Rights & Sovereignty series, and is part of Arika Episode 11: To End the World As We Know It, which takers place from 13th - 17th November. For more information please visit arika.org.uk.

This event is part of the Race, Rights & Sovereignty 'What Will Be the Cure?' strand.

‘What Will Be the Cure?’ is a programme strand geared towards artists and practitioners who wish to collectivise, experiment, and conspire towards transformative change.

Race, Rights and Sovereignty is a programme supported by GSA Students Association in partnership with GSA Exhibitions.

‘Race, Rights and Sovereignty programme’ is now in its sixth year. It was established as a partnership between The Art School: GSA's Students' Association (GSASA) and GSA Exhibitions. The programme has been developed in order to create opportunities, and forums, to engage with and unpack ideas and issues related to race, rights & sovereignty; particularly in the contexts of creative practice. The series aims to celebrate, challenge, inform and inspire the next generation of artists, designers and architects, empowering them to have a creative voice.

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Practicing What We Preach: Integrating Care and Integrity in our Practices
with Saoirse Amira Anis

4 – 6pm Tuesday 17th September 2024
Project Space 1, GSA Student's Association, 20 Scott St Glasgow G3 6RJ
Free but ticketed – Book via Eventbrite

Join us from 4pm on Tuesday 17th September for Practicing What We Preach: Integrating Care and Integrity in our Practices, a workshop with Saoirse Amira Anis.

How can we ensure that care and integrity are not just ideals but active in our practices?

In this artist talk and workshop Saoirse Amira Anis will discuss their practice and how its themes have evolved since leaving art school, shaped by personal experiences, socio-political climates, and the communities that have supported them. Focusing on the importance of community, care, and integrity, Saoirse will guide participants in creating a toolkit to navigate the worlds of art institutions and the broader art sector without succumbing to the pitfalls of careerism.

Saoirse Amira Anis' creative practice prioritises radical care, informality and empathy, influenced by their Scottish and Moroccan heritage and underpinned by interests in Black queer theory, Disability Justice, and politics of liberation. Through writing, moving image and performance, they consider how the body holds ancestral and lived memories, particularly in relation to guilt, shame and resistance. Recent projects include solo shows at Dundee Contemporary Arts (2023) and Cample Line (2022), and major commissions for Art Night (2023) and Platform, Edinburgh Art Festival (2022).

This event is part of the Race, Rights & Sovereignty ‘What Will Be the Cure?’ strand.

‘What Will Be the Cure?’ is a programme strand geared towards artists and practitioners who wish to collectivise, experiment, and conspire towards transformative change. Race, Rights and Sovereignty is a programme supported by GSA Students Association in partnership with GSA Exhibitions

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Listening and Empathetic Witnessing as Writing Practices
with Nisha Ramayya

6 – 8pm Thursday 25th July 2024
Woodlands Community Development Trust, 66 Ashley Street Glasgow G3 6HW
Free but ticketed – Book via Eventbrite

Join us from 6pm on Thursday 25th July for Listening and Empathetic Witnessing as Writing Practices, a workshop with Nisha Ramayya.

How do we feel and understand the extent and ever-presence of grief, and what does that mean for how we think about and practice care?

In this workshop led by Nisha Ramayya, we’ll test the possibilities of listening and empathetic witnessing as writing practices. Adapting the deep listening practices of Pauline Oliveros, we’ll hear Blood and Moths, a sound work by Bint Mbareh, and consider how this work weaves music, narrative, documentary recordings, and sound effects to counter what Mbareh describes as ‘the epistemological authority of the settler colony’. Alongside discussion and writing, we’ll consider what deep listening opens up affectively, socially, and politically, and try to make poems that bear witness and create spaces for individual and collective grief.

The workshop facilitator recognizes the potentially overwhelming nature of exploring grief, the significant emotional weight of this historical moment, and the diverse ways it might affect you as you contemplate the themes of this workshop. There will be no expectations for you to perform or engage beyond your comfort levels.

Nisha Ramayya works across poetry, criticism and collaborative performance, and teaches creative writing. She is the author of States of the Body Produced by Love, among other works.

This event is part of the Race, Rights & Sovereignty ‘What Will Be the Cure?’ strand.

Memory and Preservation: Revisiting Black Women’s Photo Archives
with Pelumi Odubanjo & Beulah Ezeugo

6 – 7pm Thursday 11th July 2024
Online Conversation (Zoom)
Free but ticketed – Book via Eventbrite

Join us online on Thursday, July 11th for ‘Memory and Preservation: Revisiting Black Women’s Photo Archives’.

This presentation builds on current discussions spurred by the recent digitisation and exhibition of Sandra George‘s archive by Craigmillar Now and GSA Exhibitions.

In this online talk, curator and PhD researcher Pelumi Odubanjo will present her research into photographic archives, with close focus being paid to the archive of the Nigerian educator and women’s right activist, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti. Pelumi will discuss what she considers to be the sociality of photographs, and their roles as material art objects within the contexts of Funmilayo’s and Sandra George’s collections. Following the presentation, Pelumi will be joined in conversation by Beulah Ezeugo, speculating on the future care and preservation of Black archives.

This event is part of the Race, Rights & Sovereignty ‘What Will Be the Cure?’ strand.

Pelumi Odubanjo is a curator, writer, and PhD researcher based between London and Glasgow. Her interests in contemporary art are cross-disciplinary, with specific interests in contemporary photography and overlooked visual histories. Pelumi is a PhD candidate in the history of art at the University of Glasgow, where she is a recipient of the James McCune Smith Scholarship. Pelumi currently works as the assistant curator for Glasgow International.

Beulah Ezeugo is a curator & researcher who works with others against the rapid tightening and regularisation of borders. Her research practice engages with postcolonial geographies & memory. Her curatorial practice expands outwards through exhibition-making, programming, & publication. Beulah is a research associate at CCA Derry~Londonderry & one-half of the collective Éireann & I, a migrant memory project & community archive. Beulah has programmed Race, Rights and Sovereignty since 2023.

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Translating Art into Action
a workshop with artist, writer, and activist Hussein Mitha

5 - 7pm Wednesday 15th May 2024
GSASA Project Spaces
Free but ticketed - Book via MS Forms

Join us for "Translating Art into Action," a workshop hosted by Hussein Mitha—an artist, writer, and activist.

Universities worldwide are witnessing a surge of student mobilisation in solidarity with Palestine, marked most recently by the establishment of encampments on university grounds. These spaces serve as hubs for drafting new social contracts and translating political aspirations into action.

In consideration of this movement, and other histories of student-led organising, we invite you to join us in discussion and group activities where we will find links between art and political action.

The workshop will take place alongside the new GSASA Archives Exhibition, ‘Speculative Fictioning’ and will allow time for engagement with university ephemera from the 1930s to the present.

The session will run from 6 PM – 8 PM on Weds 15th of May in GSASA Assembly Building Project Spaces.

In this workshop, we will discuss/think through and contemplate the function of art in a time of genocide: its radical potential and its reactionary deployment in the service of the status quo. The workshop facilitator is aware of the potentially overwhelming nature of the subject matter, and we will aim to provide a caring space, informed by values of camaraderie and mutual support. Participants are not expected to perform knowledge or to participate beyond their capacities.

This event is part of the Race, Rights & Sovereignty 'What Will Be the Cure?' strand. ‘What Will Be the Cure?’ is a programme strand geared towards artists and practitioners who wish to collectivise, experiment, and conspire towards transformative change.

Hussein Mitha is an artist, writer and organiser who lives in Glasgow.

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“What is art in the time of genocide?”
Jemma Desai & Nehad Khader

6 - 8pm Wednesday 13th March 2024
Online Conversation (Zoom)
Free but ticketed - Book via MS Forms

The context of cultural work for those who are engaged in Palestinian activism at this moment sits alongside long-standing campaigns such as PACBI, and more recent autonomous movements such as StrikeGermany. We now also see withholding of funding, the cancellation of art workers by cultural institutions and the threat of scrutiny by our employers should our wish to speak out against a genocide be deemed ‘reputational damage.’

What do we need to “stay with the trouble” of the different currents of this time and not circumvent their contradictions and complexities? How can we meaningfully examine these institutional responses and complicities, so that we might find spaces and energies to invest in practices, relationships and ways of being that might render these institutions and the formations they create obsolete?

In this session, two friends, Jemma Desai and Nehad Khader, will talk to each other about the work they do in art and film. They will offer practices, questions and probably very few answers. The conversation will be rooted in a desire for connection, rather than a space of critique so we invite you to bring things to support you to feel open. We would like to invite all who attend to bring an offering of some kind to share with others attending.

In this session, we will refer to themes of genocide and institutional indifference to colonial violence. We would like to acknowledge the overwhelming nature of this moment in history and how this may be showing up in many different ways for you as you consider the themes of this workshop. We will offer a container that is cognizant of this and will offer a caring space where emotion is welcome, and somatic skills to support it are present in the facilitation. We also invite you to be mindful of your capacities for group work and listening at this time as you consider this invitation.

Jemma Desai stands against the the genocide of the Palestinian people and is reconsidering her work biography in light of this commitment. In the present moment she is a cultural worker across film, visual arts and performance and a somatic facilitator working with individuals and groups.

Nehad Khader is the festival director at BlackStar Projects, where she heads the annual BlackStar Film Festival as well as all curatorial projects.

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COCONUT HEAD GENERATION
A Film by Alain Kassanda

6 - 8pm Tuesday 12th March 2024
Reid Lecture Theatre
The Glasgow School of Art
167 Renfrew St, Glasgow G3 6RQ
Free but ticketed - Book via Eventbrite

Join us for a screening of Alain Kassanda’s Coconut Head Generation, which documents the height of the #EndSARS movement and a people’s struggle for collective power. Refreshments and a space for informal discussion will be provided after the screening.

Every Thursday, a group of students from the University of Ibadan, the oldest in Nigeria, organizes a film club, transforming a small lecture hall into a political agora where they develop a critical voice. "Coconut Head Generation", a scornful expression to designate a stubborn and brainless youth, takes on a whole new meaning when the students turn this stigma around to claim their freedom of thought.

This event is part of the Race, Rights & Sovereignty 'What Will Be the Cure?' strand. ‘What Will Be the Cure?’ is a programme strand geared towards artists and practitioners who wish to collectivise, experiment, and conspire towards transformative change.

Programmed in partnership with the GSASA for Independent Study Week – For more info on other events taking place click here.

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.

REBELLIOUS KINSHIP,
UNCONDITIONAL BEING:
Zine making as radical information sharing and care

Martha Adonai Williams

2 - 4pm Tuesday 6th February
Glasgow Zine Library, 32 - 34 Albert Road
Glasgow G42 8DN

Free but ticketed* - Book via Eventbrite

Come along for a relaxed afternoon of zine making with Glasgow Zine Library as we learn about zines as a method of radical information sharing and as a tool for self and collective care.

Zines are self-published magazines. Often made using simple and cheap methods, they provide a publishing platform outside of the mainstream for creativity, activism and building community.

This will be a relaxed hands-on workshop led by GZL programme coordinator Martha Adonai Williams. You will explore the GZL collection of around 4000 zines, learning how zines are used to share information among communities of colour, and as a tool for self and collective care.

You will have a go at making your own zine using collage, colour and words, which you’ll get to take home.

No experience necessary. All materials provided, tea/coffee & biscuits too.

*Please note this is a closed workshop for people identifying as Black, Indigenous and/or People of Colour.

About Glasgow Zine Library

Glasgow Zine Library is a community archive and zine library based in Govanhill, Glasgow, established in 2018. We have a growing international collection of over 1000 zines (self-published magazines). GZL also hosts a blended online/offline programme of workshops, professional and artistic development opportunities, community meals, film screenings, discussion groups, reading groups, children’s arts and crafts, social clubs, heritage activities and more. All of our events are either free or pay-what-you-can. We also programme Glasgow Zine Fest, an annual celebration of zine culture, now in its 10th year.

About Martha Adonai Williams

Martha Adonai Williams (she/her) is a writer, facilitator, organiser, and friend. Her practice departs to and returns from Black feminist world making, always, with regular lay-overs 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.

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.

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RRS x GSASA present:
Unruly Bodies: Capturing the (in)visible and (im)possible - A Photogrammetry workshop with Rosalie Yu

Friday 10th November
14:00 -16:00
Project Rooms 1 & 2, GSASA Building
20 Scott Street, Glasgow G3 6PE
Free but ticketed

How might we approach photogrammetry as a viewing apparatus that provides new ways of metabolizing our physical and emotional reality? This two-hour workshop will start a quick overview of the theory and history of photography in relation to photogrammetry, a spatial measurement tool generally used for extracting data for profit. We’ll then dive into a few projects that reframe and manipulate these emerging photo techniques to give form to emotions and expressions that fall outside of conventional categories. The second part of the workshop will explore the technical aspects and applications of these spatial measurement tools. The hands-on segment will entail 3D scanning a small figure using smartphones. By the end of the workshop, participants will have the opportunity to transform their creations into augmented reality and share their scans with the rest of the participants.

This workshop is an adaptation of Rosalie’s previous workshop, the “Photographic Knitting Club”. Participants will receive a preparation email prior to the workshop; no prior scanning experience is required.

Book your free ticket here

About the artist:

In my practice I use and misuse digital tools, working with data as a material that I sculpt and transform into visualizations, resin sculptures, domestic installations, and printed material. In doing so, I am thinking about this deliberate and creative misapplication of tools as a queering of the technology, making visible the norms of engagement that continuously construct our identity. As a Taiwanese artist, I also connect these manipulations of technology to the condition of being politically contested and marginalized.

Figures and models for the workshop

Please note this workshop is to scan characters made in the Beastly Clay workshop at the GSA Students’ Association the day before (on Thursday 9th November), so please sign up to both workshops to join this event. You can join the Beastly Clay workshop via the GSASA Website here.

If you can’t join the Beastly Clay workshop, please bring a small matte object or model you want to scan (maximum 30cm in height and width).

This event is 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.

RRS x The Friday Event present:
maud. Screening and Q+A with Natasha Thembiso Ruwona, Chizu Anucha
& Tomiwa Folorunso

Friday 27th October
11:00 -12:30
Glasgow Film Theatre
12 Rose St, Glasgow G3 6RB
Free and all welcome

maud. is a call to celebrate the life and work of the Scottish-Ghanaian artist Maud Sulter (1960 - 2008) who grew up in the Gorbals, Glasgow. Maud had an extremely diverse output of artistry; writing, image-making, curating, filmmaking, and sound. Her significance on multiple fronts - as a Black Scottish, Black British, African, Ghanaian, queer, working class and female artist has until recently largely gone uncelebrated. The film considers her memory through conversations with Black artists who are making art in Scotland today, and reflects on Maud’s important contributions to excavating history, challenging art world politics, and community-building.

To accompany this screening we will be joined by filmmakers Natasha Thembiso Ruwona (director), Chizu Anucha (sound designer) and Tomiwa Folorunso (executive producer), who will be in conversation.

This event is a collaboration between the School of Fine Art and the Race, Rights and Sovereignty Series and presented as part of The Friday Event, a series of lectures and discussions hosted by the School of Fine Art at Glasgow School of Art

Biographies:

Natasha Thembiso Ruwona (Director) is a moving-image artist, researcher, and curator-programmer-producer. She is interested in spatial practice

and Afrofuturism as methods of thinking about place across time.

Natasha also investigates processes of healing in relation to

understanding our environments.

Chizu Anucha is an audiovisual artist currently based in Glasgow, working with music and its relationship to the moving image. His practice meets at the intersection of music composition, video and site-responsive performance. His moving image work romanticises everyday practices through poetic and reflexive styles of documentary filmmaking, while his music brings together internal conflicts, yearnings and nostalgic relics to investigate tensions inherent in the publicness of the black body. He believes in the transformative role of music and performance, and its function in assessing our emotional landscapes. With this he experiments in the formation of historical and fictional narratives, often by recontextualising archive film and collages of VHS video with a music soundtrack at the fore.

Tomiwa Folorunso is an Editor, Producer and Film Programmer based between Brussels and Edinburgh. She has a special interest in

contemporary culture, lifestyle, social politics, diasporas, and Black-Scottish histories, in film and literature. She is a co-presenter

and researcher for the podcast, Sheku Bayoh: The Inquiry, and writes a monthly-ishhh substack dear lexi. You can find her on Instagram @

tomiwafolorunso.

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.

Closed workshop for artists and arts workers identifying as Black, Indigenous and/or People of Colour

How might we care for ourselves and one another, in this current wave of crises? How might we exist and practice alongside one another, holding space for critical thinking in / and / as care?

We began with a conversation between Adebusola, Nat and Claricia sharing perspectives, experiences and questions, opening to the group over sharing lunch.

Drawing on collective experiences this session unearthed new questions and co-imagine strategies for cultivating solidarity, accountability & peer support across difference; in the communities we seek out and those we find ourselves in.

This workshop was a follow-up to Claricia's previous workshop in March 'if you.. / criticality in and of, as, care'. Claricia offered a provocation centring a criticality in and of care, as care, rooted in value-based approaches across their multifaceted practice.

Limited spaces, please book by emailing N.Ruwona@gsa.ac.uk and let us know if you can no longer attend.

Lunch will be provided, please let us know any allergies or dietary requirements.

A quiet/rest space will be provided inside Tramway building on the upper floor, and one-to-one welfare support available.

'Conversation workshop: criticality in / and / of / as care', in community with Claricia Parinussa, Adebusola Ramsay and Nat Raha

Biographies

Adebusola Ramsay (b. 1983, Lagos, Nigeria) is a visual artist, independent researcher and also works in public health based in Glasgow, Scotland.

Their visual artist practice has developed over the last two decades; it features evocative colour composition and textural detail, mostly with acrylic medium, exploring different forms of mark-making. Influenced by patterns and symbols, in particular weave/pattern-making of African cloths such as Aso-Oke, Kente and Adire

Graduated in 2004 with Bsc (Hons) Biomedical Sciences at University of Glasgow.

I paint to allow myself to think over what has been observed, to ruminate safely

I play with mark-making, create patterns and structures

I paint with colour to be evocative, to explore colour relationships

I paint so I can learn to play or remember how to play.

Adebusola's research practice their research has focused on history of racialisation, chattel slavery and colonisation, also the modes and mechanisms of racism and anti-racism practice. On this topic they have consulted with clients such as Glasgow Life, National Gallery Scotland and Scottish Government.

Claricia Parinussa is an artist, producer, facilitator, researcher and community organiser. 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, Claricia is a 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.

Dr Nat Raha is a poet and activist-scholar, and Lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies at Glasgow School of Art. Her work is of an experimental queer lyric, attending to the everyday of marginalised lives, hirstories of struggle and resistance to racial capitalism, of humans and the more-than-human. She works through de/re/materialising sound, form and syntax, on the page and in performance. Her books of poetry include of sirens, body & faultlines (Boiler House Press, 2018), countersonnets (Contraband Books, 2013) and apparitions (nines) (Winner of the Nightboat Books Poetry Prize, forthcoming 2024). Her work is anthologised in 100 Queer Poems (Vintage 2022), We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat, 2020), Liberating the Canon: An Anthology of Innovative Literature (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2018). Her poetry has been translated in numerous languages, and she’s performed her work internationally. Recent critical writing appears in Queer Print in Europe (Bloomsbury, 2022), Transgender Marxism (Pluto Press, 2021), New Feminist Literary Studies (CUP, 2020) and Third Text (‘Imagining Queer Europe then and now’, 2021). With Mijke van der Drift, Nat co-edits Radical Transfeminism zine, and is currently co-authoring a book Trans Femme Futures: An Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds (forthcoming, 2024).

Access

The Hidden Gardens are fully wheelchair accessible at both entrances from Pollokshaws Road and through Tramway. There are wide stone paths around The Gardens, and ramps to take you into the Medicinal Courtyard and Boilerhouse. Assistance dogs only allowed. You can plan your visit here.

If you can let us know in advance if you have any medical conditions that we should be aware of, or if you will need any assistance on the day. You can do this by emailing: racerightssovereignty@gsa.ac.uk

If you have COVID-19 symptoms please stay at home. Tell people you were recently in contact with and stay at home until 5 days after the first day that you tested positive (or if you have not taken a test, until you no longer have a fever or a COVID cough) and follow guidance www.NHSInform.Scot

If you cannot take your place for any reason, please let us know in advance and we will re-distribute the ticket.

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.

Image (above): fire ants join bodies to create a raft for surviving a flood, credit Georgia Institute of Technology

Friday 28th July
13:00-15:00
Boilerhouse, Hidden Gardens
Behind Tramway, 25 Albert Drive,
Glasgow G41 2PE

RRS x GSASA: Cyberfeminism Index online performative reading by Mindy Seu, followed by a screening of FRESH KILL by Shu Lea Cheang

Thursday 21st September
17:00 -19:45
Bourdon Lecture Theatre, GSA Bourdon Building
Scott Street, Glasgow G3 6RQ
Free but ticketed*

Join us for the Scottish book launch of the Cyberfeminism Index with an online performative reading by its editor, the designer, professor, and researcher Mindy Seu. Seu’s talk will be followed by a screening of FRESH KILL (1994), the debut feature film by legendary multimedia artist and filmmaker Shu Lea Cheang, one of the artists featured in the Index.

Book your free ticket here

In Cyberfeminism Index, hackers, scholars, artists, and activists of all regions, races and sexual orientations consider how humans might reconstruct themselves by way of technology. When learning about internet history, we are taught to focus on engineering, the military-industrial complex, and the grandfathers who created the architecture and protocol, but the internet is not only a network of cables, servers, and computers. It is an environment that shapes and is shaped by its inhabitants and their use.

The creation and use of the Cyberfeminism Index is a social and political act. It takes the name cyberfeminism as an umbrella, complicates it, and pushes it into plain sight. Edited by designer, professor, and researcher Mindy Seu, it includes more than 700 short entries of radical techno-critical activism in a variety of media, including excerpts from academic articles and scholarly texts; descriptions of hackerspaces, digital rights activist groups, and bio-hacktivism; and depictions of feminist net art and new media art.

Contributors include: VNS Matrix, Sin Wai Kin, Danielle Braithwaite-Shirley, Mary Maggic, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Sadie Plant, Old Boys Network, Shu Lea Cheang, Cornelia Sollfrank, subRosa, Skawennati, Legacy Russell, and Black Quantum Futurism.

Taiwanese-born new-media visionary Shu Lea Cheang directs this avant-anarcho ecosatire, in which a lesbian couple living on Staten Island find themselves ensnared in a vast conspiracy involving a ghost ship of nuclear refuse, ominous television commercials, and deadly cat food. Envisioning New York City as a toxic waste dump of consumerist detritus, FRESH KILL offers a bracing, queer feminist response to the patriarchal poison of corporate capitalism.

Directed by Shu Lea Cheang, 1994, U.S
Starring Sarita Choudhury, Erin McMurtry, Abraham Lim
Please note FRESH KILL has a UK rating certificate 18.

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Biographies

Mindy Seu is a designer and technologist based in New York City, currently teaching as an Assistant Professor at Rutgers Mason Gross School of the Arts and Critic at Yale School of Art. Her expanded practice involves archival projects, techno-critical writing, performative lectures, and design commissions. Mindy’s ongoing Cyberfeminism Index, which gathers three decades of online activism and net art, was commissioned by Rhizome, presented at the New Museum, and awarded a Graham Foundation Grant.

Shu Lea Cheang is an artist and filmmaker working with various art mediums and film formats, including installation, performance, net art, public art, video installation, feature-length film and mobile web serial. As a net art pioneer, her project BRANDON (1998-1999) was the first web art commissioned and collected by the Guggenheim Museum in New York. She drafts sci-fi narratives in her film scenario and artwork imagination, crafting her own “science” fiction genre of new queer cinema, terming them eco-cybernoia (FRESH KILL, 1994), sci-fi cyberpunk (I.K.U., 2000), sci-fi cypherpunk (Fluidø, 2017). In 2019 Cheang represented Taiwan with a solo exhibition 3x3x6 at Venice Biennale.

*Notes on tickets for this event:

Mindy Seu will be live streaming from the U.S for this performative lecture. You are welcome to join by Zoom or in person at the GSA Bourdon Lecture Theatre. FRESH KILL will only be available to watch live at the GSA Bourdon Lecture Theatre.

Digital tickets (to join by Zoom): These tickets will be available for the Cyberfeminism Index talk only.

In-Person tickets: If you are coming in person, you are welcome to book a ticket for either the Cyberfeminism Index talk, the Fresh Kill screening, or both. Please note that we will have a break and refreshments between the talk and the screening.

All tickets for the event are free, but please book in advance.

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.

Monday 22 May 2023
14:00-16:00
Woodlands Community Garden, Meeting Room
Book via Eventbrite

Stimulated by text-based prompts provided by Clarinda, participants engaged as membranes, rejecting and choosing with bodily intelligence in this compositional, playful, continually shifting two-hour workshop.

Exercises focused on relieving cranial pressure, playing scapula muscles as a harp, imagination as a cat, and connecting with prehistoric plants, landfill waste and cellular self.

This workshop explored making with the body and attempting to dip in on developing an unburdening practice.

Participants were welcome to rest at any point and we had a designated rest area in the Woodlands Meeting Room. We will also take breaks throughout the workshop. We acknowledge that movement-based workshops could imply a degree of physical demand and vulnerability within a group setting.

Image of blue hues. A person sitting in protective position. A bigger person in the background from a worm’s eye-view, dropping a jelly substance with a ladle.

'Micro Moves, open-eyed, tidal body: Gentle Movement Workshop' by Clarinda Tse

Clarinda Tse is an interdisciplinary performance maker, bodyworker and workshop facilitator-learner-sharer, Hong Kong-born and Glasgow-based.

Their work explores compositions of material ecologies and bodies as agency for worlding. Their habitat is sensual, slippery, more-than-human and transitional, fragmented, drawn from everyday experience, multiplicities of selves, play and cellular reconciliation, across mediums of live art, text, sculpture and sound.

They have presented work at Buzzcut Double Thrills 2022, Unifix 2021, Present Futures 2021 and were supported by The Work Room, Bothy Project, Transmission, Glasgow and Market Gallery.

'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.

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.

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

Sovereignty in Sound - Listening to remember
Zethu Maseko

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

RRS - Zethu - ONLINE MARKETING 1080x566.jpg

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.

An Exercise In Exorcism_group performance_Ashanti Harris_2021_.jpg

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.

creative commons for Martha workshop 2022.jpg

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.

‘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.

unnamed_courtesy the artist, Lisandro Mu

Image courtesy Lisandro Suriel

Lecture

Larry Achiampong

Thursday 26th September 2019,

18:00 - 20:00

Reid Auditorium, The Glasgow School of Art

167 Renfrew St, Glasgow, G3 6RQ

WIDESHOT_S001_S001_T009.00_19_15_13.Stil

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

www.larryachiampong.co.uk

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

Free, but ticketed via CCA.

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

Click here to download Reading List

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

Khichdi / Kedgeree: Food Culture in Transnational Identities

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.

Past Events

marikiscrycrycry, $ELFIE$ at Fierce, 2017, photo by Manuel Vason

I AM NOT A NATION-STATE Leanne Betasamosake Simpson in conversation with Nat Raha

3 – 4.30pm Wednesday 13th November 2024 Bourdon Lecture Theatre (Second Floor), GSA Bourdon Building Scott Street, Glasgow G3 6RQ Free but ticketed – Book via Eventbrite

Practicing What We Preach: Integrating Care and Integrity in our Practices with Saoirse Amira Anis

4 – 6pm Tuesday 17th September 2024 Project Space 1, GSA Student's Association, 20 Scott St Glasgow G3 6RJ Free but ticketed – Book via Eventbrite

Listening and Empathetic Witnessing as Writing Practices with Nisha Ramayya

6 – 8pm Thursday 25th July 2024 Woodlands Community Development Trust, 66 Ashley Street Glasgow G3 6HW Free but ticketed – Book via Eventbrite

Memory and Preservation: Revisiting Black Women’s Photo Archives with Pelumi Odubanjo & Beulah Ezeugo

6 – 7pm Thursday 11th July 2024 Online Conversation (Zoom) Free but ticketed – Book via Eventbrite

Translating Art into Action a workshop with artist, writer, and activist Hussein Mitha

5 - 7pm Wednesday 15th May 2024 GSASA Project Spaces Free but ticketed - Book via MS Forms

“What is art in the time of genocide?” Jemma Desai & Nehad Khader

6 - 8pm Wednesday 13th March 2024 Online Conversation (Zoom) Free but ticketed - Book via MS Forms

COCONUT HEAD GENERATION A Film by Alain Kassanda

6 - 8pm Tuesday 12th March 2024 Reid Lecture Theatre The Glasgow School of Art 167 Renfrew St, Glasgow G3 6RQ Free but ticketed - Book via Eventbrite

REBELLIOUS KINSHIP, UNCONDITIONAL BEING: Zine making as radical information sharing and care

Martha Adonai Williams 2 - 4pm Tuesday 6th February Glasgow Zine Library, 32 - 34 Albert Road Glasgow G42 8DN Free but ticketed* - Book via Eventbrite

RRS x GSASA present: Unruly Bodies: Capturing the (in)visible and (im)possible - A Photogrammetry workshop with Rosalie Yu

Friday 10th November 14:00 -16:00 Project Rooms 1 & 2, GSASA Building 20 Scott Street, Glasgow G3 6PE Free but ticketed

RRS x The Friday Event present: maud. Screening and Q+A with Natasha Thembiso Ruwona, Chizu Anucha & Tomiwa Folorunso

Friday 27th October 11:00 -12:30 Glasgow Film Theatre 12 Rose St, Glasgow G3 6RB Free and all welcome

'Conversation workshop: criticality in / and / of / as care', in community with Claricia Parinussa, Adebusola Ramsay and Nat Raha

Friday 28th July 13:00-15:00 Boilerhouse, Hidden Gardens Behind Tramway, 25 Albert Drive, Glasgow G41 2PE

RRS x GSASA: Cyberfeminism Index online performative reading by Mindy Seu, followed by a screening of FRESH KILL by Shu Lea Cheang

Thursday 21st September 17:00 -19:45 Bourdon Lecture Theatre, GSA Bourdon Building Scott Street, Glasgow G3 6RQ Free but ticketed*

Monday 22 May 2023 14:00-16:00 Woodlands Community Garden, Meeting Room Book via Eventbrite

'Micro Moves, open-eyed, tidal body: Gentle Movement Workshop' by Clarinda Tse

'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

Friday 20 January 2023 10:30 - 12:00 Fleming House, 164 Renfrew Street

Letter Drawing with Clay, workshop led by Zoë Tumika

Hussein Mitha, “Europe is a garden”: the border and ecological crisis

Tuesday 8 November 2022 17:30 - 19:00 The Assembly Hall, GSASA

Furmaan Ahmed In Conversation with Myriam Mouflih

Thursday 22 September 17:30 - 19:00 The Assembly Hall, GSASA

Sovereignty in Sound - Listening to remember Zethu Maseko

Tuesday 2 August 2022 14:30 - 16:30 Woodlands Community Garden Meeting Room

Listening with the Body: A Walking Workshop Ashanti Harris

Thursday 16 June 2022 14:00 - 16:00 Glasgow Women's Library & Glasgow Green

Workshop

In the Darkness, New Life Emerges: A Writing Workshop Martha Adonai Williams

Tuesday 3 May 2022 14:30 - 16:30 Woodlands Community Garden

‘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

Lecture & Seminar

Strategies of Ecological Witnessing Imani Jacqueline Brown

Lecture: 24 May 2021 Seminar: 25 May 2021

‘Deep Implicancy’ Professor Denise Ferreira da Silva

Wednesday 17 November 2021 19:00-20:00 Online

Talk

CURATE-WRITE-REFLECT-WRITE-CURATE-REFLECT-CURATE-REFLECT-WRITE

Prof. Carol Tulloch

Tuesday 27th April 2021

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

Seminar

Decolonising the

Digital Self

Libby Odai

2 February 2021 Online via Zoom

Lecture

Knocking on the Door: Complaints and Other Stories about Institutions

Sara Ahmed

16 February 2021

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

​

​

Artist Talk

Tako Taal

I AM NOT A NATION-STATE
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson in conversation with Nat Raha

3 – 4.30pm Wednesday 13th November 2024
Bourdon Lecture Theatre (Second Floor), GSA Bourdon Building
Scott Street, Glasgow G3 6RQ
Free but ticketed – Book via Eventbrite

Practicing What We Preach: Integrating Care and Integrity in our Practices
with Saoirse Amira Anis

4 – 6pm Tuesday 17th September 2024
Project Space 1, GSA Student's Association, 20 Scott St Glasgow G3 6RJ
Free but ticketed – Book via Eventbrite

Listening and Empathetic Witnessing as Writing Practices
with Nisha Ramayya

6 – 8pm Thursday 25th July 2024
Woodlands Community Development Trust, 66 Ashley Street Glasgow G3 6HW
Free but ticketed – Book via Eventbrite

Memory and Preservation: Revisiting Black Women’s Photo Archives
with Pelumi Odubanjo & Beulah Ezeugo

6 – 7pm Thursday 11th July 2024
Online Conversation (Zoom)
Free but ticketed – Book via Eventbrite

Translating Art into Action
a workshop with artist, writer, and activist Hussein Mitha

5 - 7pm Wednesday 15th May 2024
GSASA Project Spaces
Free but ticketed - Book via MS Forms

“What is art in the time of genocide?”
Jemma Desai & Nehad Khader

6 - 8pm Wednesday 13th March 2024
Online Conversation (Zoom)
Free but ticketed - Book via MS Forms

COCONUT HEAD GENERATION
A Film by Alain Kassanda

6 - 8pm Tuesday 12th March 2024
Reid Lecture Theatre
The Glasgow School of Art
167 Renfrew St, Glasgow G3 6RQ
Free but ticketed - Book via Eventbrite

REBELLIOUS KINSHIP,
UNCONDITIONAL BEING:
Zine making as radical information sharing and care

Martha Adonai Williams

2 - 4pm Tuesday 6th February
Glasgow Zine Library, 32 - 34 Albert Road
Glasgow G42 8DN

Free but ticketed* - Book via Eventbrite

RRS x GSASA present:
Unruly Bodies: Capturing the (in)visible and (im)possible - A Photogrammetry workshop with Rosalie Yu

Friday 10th November
14:00 -16:00
Project Rooms 1 & 2, GSASA Building
20 Scott Street, Glasgow G3 6PE
Free but ticketed

RRS x The Friday Event present:
maud. Screening and Q+A with Natasha Thembiso Ruwona, Chizu Anucha
& Tomiwa Folorunso

Friday 27th October
11:00 -12:30
Glasgow Film Theatre
12 Rose St, Glasgow G3 6RB
Free and all welcome

Friday 28th July
13:00-15:00
Boilerhouse, Hidden Gardens
Behind Tramway, 25 Albert Drive,
Glasgow G41 2PE

Thursday 21st September
17:00 -19:45
Bourdon Lecture Theatre, GSA Bourdon Building
Scott Street, Glasgow G3 6RQ
Free but ticketed*

Monday 22 May 2023
14:00-16:00
Woodlands Community Garden, Meeting Room
Book via Eventbrite

Thursday 9 March 2023
17:30 - 19:00
Reid Lecture Theatre, Reid Building, GSA
Book via Eventbrite

Friday 20 January 2023
10:30 - 12:00
Fleming House, 164 Renfrew Street

Tuesday 8 November 2022
17:30 - 19:00
The Assembly Hall, GSASA

Thursday 22 September
17:30 - 19:00
The Assembly Hall, GSASA

Sovereignty in Sound - Listening to remember
Zethu Maseko

Tuesday 2 August 2022
14:30 - 16:30
Woodlands Community Garden Meeting Room

Listening with the Body: A Walking Workshop
Ashanti Harris

Thursday 16 June 2022
14:00 - 16:00
Glasgow Women's Library & Glasgow Green

In the Darkness, New Life Emerges:
A Writing Workshop
Martha Adonai Williams

Tuesday 3 May 2022
14:30 - 16:30
Woodlands Community Garden

‘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

Strategies of Ecological Witnessing
Imani Jacqueline Brown

Lecture: 24 May 2021

Seminar: 25 May 2021

‘Deep Implicancy’
Professor Denise Ferreira da Silva

Wednesday 17 November 2021
19:00-20:00
Online

28 January 2021

Online via Zoom

2 February 2021

Online via Zoom