Join us for a free, online talk between Irene Lusztig and Patricia Francis – part of the When I Dare to be Powerful conference.
Patricia Francis and filmmaker Irene Lusztig will explore and discuss the value of archive in bringing voices and their subjective truths from the past into the present. Irene will also show extracts from a couple of her films including her latest release, Richland.
This is the final in the series of online talks and podcast conversations we have been having as part of the When I Dare To Be Powerful in-person international conference.
Bio:
Irene Lusztig is a filmmaker, visual artist, archival researcher, and amateur seamstress. Her film and video work mines old images and technologies for new meanings in order to reframe, recuperate, and reanimate forgotten and neglected histories. Often beginning with rigorous research in archives, her work brings historical materials into conversation with the present day, inviting viewers to explore historical spaces as a way to contemplate larger questions of politics, ideology, and the production of personal, collective, and national memories. Much of Irene’s current work is centred on public feminism, language, and histories of women and women’s bodies, including her debut feature Reconstruction (2001) the feature length archival film essay The Motherhood Archives (2013) and the ongoing web-based Worry Box Project (2011).
Born in England to Romanian parents, Irene grew up in Boston and has lived in France, Italy, Romania, China, and Russia. Her work has been screened around the world, including at the Berlinale, MoMA, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Anthology Film Archives, Pacific Film Archive, Flaherty NYC, IDFA Amsterdam, RIDM Montréal, Hot Docs, AFI Docs, and BFI London Film Festival and on television in the US, Europe, and Taiwan. She has received grants from the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, Massachusetts Cultural Council, LEF Foundation, New York State Council for the Arts, and Sustainable Arts Foundation and has been awarded fellowships at the MacDowell Colony, the Flaherty Film Seminar, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and Harvard’s Film Study Center. She is the 2016-17 recipient of a Rydell Visual Arts Fellowship and a Fulbright Fellowship in Portugal. She teaches filmmaking at UC Santa Cruz where she is Associate Professor of Film and Digital Media; she lives in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
As part of Nottingham Refugee Week, we are delighted to be presenting a comedy gig by No Direction Home, a pioneering project produced by Counterpoints Arts featuring stand-up comedians from refugee and migrant backgrounds, mentored by award-winning comedian Tom Parry.
Created in partnership with Camden People’s Theatre, it’s an ongoing project of workshops, mentoring and performance for new comics from refugee and migrant backgrounds.
The gig kicks off at 6 pm, but join us for delicious free food and drinks from the Syrian Vegan Kitchen from 5.30 pm.
This is the closing event of the ‘Hostile Environment, Artful Living’ conference that runs at Bonington during the day, and attendees of the conference have automatic entry to the gig. You’re very welcome to drop by to the gig as a stand-alone event, however, and can book a place via Eventbrite.
Check out the full Nottingham Refugee Week programme.
This one day conference, held as part of Nottingham Refugee Week, will explore how creativity can be used to resist the ‘hostile environment’ promoted against refugee and asylum-seeking communities within the UK.
The day will consist of:
Registration: 10 am
Conference: 10.30 am – 5.30 pm for free food and drinks from the Syrian Vegan Kitchen
Comedy gig: 6 – 7 pm (a more detailed schedule can be found at the end of this page)
As cited in the IPPR’s ‘Access Denied’ report (September 2020), over the past decade and beyond, the UK has witnessed the mushrooming of an aggressively hostile system that denies basic human need to those seeking sanctuary across numerous sociocultural sectors – from policing, welfare, housing, health and education to Home Office immigration systems themselves.
In response to this pervasive discourse, however, counter-narratives and counter-practices have seeded and grown with astonishing vigour across the breadth of the sociocultural sphere – from the high-profile and high-visibility (arts festivals such as Counterpoints’ ‘Refugee Week’; Charwei Tsai’s film projection ‘Hear Her Singing’ on the Southbank Centre, London; the emergence of the Cities of Sanctuary network) to altogether subtler negotiations and refusals of hostility (‘living maps’ projects whereby newly arrived sanctuary-seekers annotate maps identifying resources of use to new communities, for instance; or refugee-led wellbeing services such as Vanclaron, that operate within Serco-run hotels to nurture positive mental health). While presenting ‘life-sustaining practices’ of creative ‘uprising’ and ‘innovation’ (Espiritu et. al., 2022), this emergent nexus of narratives and practices is yet to be placed in dialogue, and thus mobilised as a site of connective critical agency.
It is the task of ‘Hostile Environment, Artful Living’ to generate a pioneering platform for such essential criticality. Blurring the boundaries between academic discourse and community-engaged activity, this 1-day event presents a series of discursive platforms designed to initiate dialogue between those working ‘artfully’ within and against the hostile environment, across and between the arts, humanities, and community-engaged sociocultural sphere.
The day is organised around three Roundtables: ‘Narratives’, exploring the mobilisation of literary, story-based, festival-based and community-based narratives that ‘artfully’ rewrite the narrative of hostility; ‘Environments’, exploring ‘artful’ negotiations of public spaces such as housing, healthcare and green space; and ‘Leading the Conversation’, presenting ‘artful’ projects developed by creatives of lived refugee experience.
Each panel consists of four ‘headline’ speakers drawn from diverse academic, cultural-creative and community locations, who will offer 10-minute presentations designed to spark debate among the wider roundtable audience. Confirmed speakers include Allan Njanji (also conference co-convenor), filmmaker of lived refugee experience, whose work explores ‘refugee voice’ in documentary journalism; blog developer Hira Aaftab, presenting refugee-led blog Our World Too; editors Rubina Bala and Alexandros Plasatis, presenting refugee-led literary journal The Other Side of Hope; and storytelling producer Naomi Wilds, discussing community-based storytelling with young communities of sanctuary-seekers. We are honoured to be hosting a Keynote (via live weblink) from Yến Lê Espiritu, Distinguished Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego, whose field-defining works on ‘critical refugee studies’ include the recent 2022 Departures and 2014 Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarised Refuge(es).
The day is bookended by performances from artists of lived refugee experience, opening with Florette Fetgo, spiritual artist of Cameroonian heritage, whose public actively contest police hostility in Nottingham; and closing with a gig from refugee-led comedy collective, No Direction Home.
We are proud to be serving complimentary food from the Nottingham-based refugee-led business, the Syrian Vegan Kitchen.
Throughout the day, our emphasis is on establishing collective, transdisciplinary dialogue on ‘hostile environment, artful living’, in the hope that our discussions will form the basis of an eventual edited collection of essays and interviews, and of an AHRC funding application.
Roundtable audience participants are invited from across every discipline and cultural sector, and are welcome to join for some or all of the day. Conference attendance includes complementary lunch courtesy of the refugee-led Syrian Vegan Kitchen, and entry to No Direction Home’s end-of-day comedy gig.
We also welcome posters, displays of projects and ‘cultural interventions’ that fit the theme of the event from participants.
The day’s events take place at Bonington Gallery, Nottingham Trent University city campus, which can be easily reached by tram or bus from Nottingham train station.
10 am – registration / coffee / creative networking activities / exhibition in foyer
10.30 am -11 am – Introduction from the organisers (Anna, Allan, Margaret) / interview with and performance from Florette
11 am -12.15 pm – Roundtable 1: ‘Narratives’. Chair: Anna Ball. Speakers X4 plus roundtable participants.
12.15 – 1.15 pm – lunch / networking.
1.15 – 2.30 pm – Roundtable 2: ‘Environments’. Chair: Margaret Ravenscroft. Speakers X4 plus roundtable participants.
2.30 -3 pm – Break
3 – 4.15 pm – Roundtable 3: ‘Leading the Conversation’. Chair: Allan Njanji. Speakers: The Other Side of Hope eds x 2, Hira, Usman.
4.15 – 4.30 pm – Break
4.30 – 5.30 pm – Keynote: Prof. Yen Le Espiritu.
5.30 – 6 pm – snacks and drinks
6 – 7 pm – No Direction Home comedy gig.
Yen le Espiritu (keynote)
Dr. Anna Ball is an Associate Professor in Postcolonial Feminisms, Literatures and Cultures at Nottingham Trent University. Anna is the author of Forced Migration in the Feminist Imagination: Transcultural Movements (Routledge 2021) and co-editor of an anthology of writing by women of forced migrant experience, The World Is for Everyone: New Writing by Pamoja Women Together (Palewell 2019). Her research explores the relationship between participatory arts, activism and cultural mobilisation within transnational (often gendered) arenas of forced migration.
Allan Njanji is a filmmaker, refugee, activist, and doctoral researcher at Nottingham Trent University. Allan is completing a practice-led PhD course, which includes the production of a documentary film, Voices, and a podcast series, Revealing the Untold: A Talking Point. T His filmmaking seeks to enable and platform refugee voices, and his films have been used by refugee charities as resource tools for casework and refugee integration practices. He is also on the boards of Nottingham Refugee Forum and Nottingham Arimathea Trust.
Margaret Ravenscroft is a PhD researcher in creative representations of forced migration and spatial justice/ feminist architectures at Nottingham Trent University. Margaret’s written work on representations of race and gender in the built environment has been published in industry press and she has forthcoming publications about gender, race and migration in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing and the Journal of Girlhood Studies. In addition to her research, Margaret oversees the strategic communications, outreach and engagement at Coffey Architects. She led the practice’s longlisted entry, ‘Rights of Passage’, for the 2023 Davidson Prize.
Join us for a free screening of a newly-translated documentary that explores the emergence of performance art in Cuba in the 1980s. The screening will be followed by a conversation with film director and artist Glexis Novoa.
The 1980s was a decade where a new generation of young artists were introducing a radical new artistic language and testing the bounds of the possible and the permissible in the process.
In the late 1970s and the 1980s multiple approaches towards the role and aesthetics of art in a socialist Cuba abounded. One particular strand saw an emerging generation of artists seeking to break free from what they saw as the bureaucratic and ideologically-orientated institutional systems and their ideas about culture. This change in attitude gave rise to a new visual language that prized interdisciplinary practices, multimedia, appropriated and referenced popular culture, religions, regional history and embraced parody and satire.
By the second half of the 1980s the arts were a site of intense discussion about artistic freedom and the nature of genuinely revolutionary art. Performance art played a key role in the articulation of the ideas and concerns of a budding generation.
Please note, this film contains some discussion of sex and nudity.
The film was initially made for the exhibition Losing the Human Form at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, which looked at art in the 1980s in Latin America.
Taking part as part of Bonington Gallery’s Formations programme in partnership with NTU’s Postcolonial Studies Centre.
Glexis Novoa was born in Holguín, Cuba in 1964. Novoa was one of the most radical influences in the vibrant art scene known as, “The Renaissance of Cuban Art of the 80s”, and was the founder of the Provisional group, pioneers of performance, political activism and collectivist practices.
Novoa established himself in Miami in 1995 and has been sharing his time working in Havana and Miami since 2013. He is recognized for his site-specific wall drawings and ephemeral projects around the world, which exist on the border between ephemeral art and architecture. He frequently focuses on the architecture of power and community as the main subject.
Novoa’s work has been exhibited extensively around the world and is part of numerous museum collections.
When I Dare to be Powerful International Conference explores the idea of voice as an agent for change and act of resistance.
Click here to reserve your ticket for the free in person conference
When I Dare to be Powerful International Conference will bring filmmakers, artists, writers and activists together with conceptual thinkers and cultural theorists to answer pressing questions relating to voice as an agent of change.
Centred on voice as a lens through which we conceive of a social alterity that undermines current ideological dominance, we would like to invite proposals from academics, practitioners and activists interested in exploring coming to voice as an act of resistance. Has adequate progress been made in remedying the lived experience of minoritised people? How will social parity be achieved? Can dissent facilitate a space from which an alternative, socio-cultural narrative can thrive?
When I Dare To Be Powerful one-day conference offers a packed programme of events running up to and including the conference itself:
The conference period begins on 26th April and runs through to the one-day conference in June. Join us in the conversations relating to voice, around which our one-day conference is based.
The conference is free to attend and will take place in person on Wednesday 21st June 2023.
Visit our When I Dare To Be Powerful website to find our more about the conference timetable.
Join Ather Zia in conversation with with Amir Kaur Aujula-Jones and Trang Dang, as part of the When I Dare to be Powerful conference at Bonington Gallery.
Amir Kaur Aujla-Jones and Trang Dang are in conversation with Ather Zia about writing as a powerful tool to amplify the voices of women active in the Kashmir conflict. Their voices are often ignored in a dominant narrative that fails to give them agency and instead writes them as victims of the conflict.
This event is part of online talks series leading to the in-person conference When I Dare to be Powerful, on 21 June at Bonington Gallery. The international conference will bring filmmakers, artists, writers and activists, together with conceptual thinkers and cultural theorists in order to answer pressing questions relating to voice as an agent of change.
Bio:
Ather Zia, Ph.D., is a political anthropologist, poet, short fiction writer, and columnist. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Gender Studies program at the University of Northern Colorado Greeley. Ather is the author of Resisting Disappearances: Military Occupation and Women’s Activism in Kashmir (June 2019) which won the 2020 Gloria Anzaldua Honorable Mention award, 2021 Public Anthropologist Award, and Advocate of the Year Award 2021. She has been featured in the Femilist 2021, a list of 100 women from the Global South working on critical issues. She is the co-editor of Can You Hear Kashmiri Women Speak (Women Unlimited 2020), Resisting Occupation in Kashmir (Upenn 2018) and A Desolation called Peace (Harper Collins, May 2019). She has published a poetry collection “The Frame” and another collection is forthcoming. Ather’s ethnographic poetry on Kashmir has won an award from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology. She is the founder-editor of Kashmir Lit and is the co-founder of Critical Kashmir Studies Collective, an interdisciplinary network of scholars working on the Kashmir region. Ather is also a co-editor of Cultural Anthropology.
Amir Kaur Aujla-Jones (she/her) has a BA (Hons) in History from the University of Sussex, a MA in Education from the University of Nottingham and a PhD in Sociology from Nottingham Trent University. Dr Aujla-Jones’s research has focused on race and gender equality using an intersectional lens. Her PhD thesis examined the lived experience of Black, Asian, and Mixed-race girls in predominantly white English secondary schools. Dr Aujla-Jones is part of Conscience Collective, an international network based in the UK aiming to extend understanding of climate and social justice.
Trang Dang (she/her) is a PhD researcher in literary studies at Nottingham Trent University, funded by NTU Studentship Scheme, and previously graduated from Oxford Brookes University with a BA and an MA in English Literature. Her PhD project focuses on Jeff VanderMeer’s weird fiction, exploring narratives of co-existence between humans and nonhumans and the role of new weird novels in portraying the current climate crisis. Her main research interests are contemporary literature, cli/sci-fi, critical theory, and continental philosophy. She has published on the topics of animal studies, American culture and politics, and the Anthropocene.
Professor Gus John and poet Yolanda Lear join Jenni Ramone’s Black Writing in Britain students and Formations audiences for a special event on the history of New Beacon Books and its place in the history of Black British publishing, writing, and activism.
Gus John discusses publishing, decolonisation, and the contemporary university. Yolanda Lear reads and discusses her poetry, and both speakers engage in conversation with English and Creative Writing students at NTU.
FORMATIONS is a public events series which foregrounds under-represented artists, writers, thinkers, and activists, run by NTU’s Postcolonial Studies Centre and Bonington Gallery.
Click here to reserve your spot at this free online event.
Biographies:
Professor Gus John is one of the co-founders of the Communities Empowerment Network – CEN. He is also a writer, education campaigner, consultant, lecturer and researcher.
He has worked extensively in the fields of education policy, management and international development and as a social analyst he specialises in social audits, change management, policy formulation and review, and programme evaluation and development.
Since the 1960s Gus has been visibly active in issues of education and schooling in Britain’s inner cities such as Manchester, Birmingham and London, and was the first black Director of Education and Leisure Services in Britain. Gus has also worked in a number of university settings, including as visiting Faculty Professor of Education at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, as an associate professor of education and honorary fellow of the London Centre for Leadership in Learning at the UCL Institute of Education, University of London and is a visiting professor at Coventry University.
A respected public speaker and media commentator, Gus works internationally as an executive coach and a management and social investment consultant. He is also a frequent contributor to the Guardian, writing on subjects including Windrush, universities and education, racism in UK institutions, and about Grenada, which is where he was born.
He is a Non-Executive Director for New Beacon Books, which was established in 1966, and is the only remaining independent Black publishing and bookselling entity in the UK. it has been central to the growth of the Black Education Movement, the Black Supplementary School Movement and current calls for the decolonisation of the curriculum.
Yolanda Lear is 28 years old. The project lead for Account Hackney, she is also a poet, an advocate for mental health, a community activist, public speaker, public rep, self-published author, youth leader and spoken word artist. Yolanda has a strong desire to create a positive change within her community and others. With her book, The Journey To An Undefeated Mind, and her workshop, she aims to empower, encourage, inspire and motivate others to take charge of their own paths in life, and help improve their own well-being.
Account Hackney is a youth-led Police Monitoring and Scrutiny Group based in Hackney. Holding the police to account, and empowering our community.
Instagram: @HackneyAccount
‘The Undefeated Mind’
Email: Info@theundefeatedmind.co.uk
Website: Theundefeatedmind.co.uk
Instagram: The_undefeatedmind
To coincide with Cedar Lewisohn’s solo exhibition earlier this year, Patois Banton, join us for a free online talk by Dr. Joseph T. Farquharson entitled Questioning Language and Knowledge: The Challenge to Creole-speaking Communities. This will be followed by a Q&A with Ramisha Rafique.
This event follows on from an in conversation with Cedar Lewisohn, Ioney Smallhorne and Honey Williams which can be watched here.
“That children learn best in their mother language, has been known for several decades. However, the application has been very slow in societies where the mother language of the majority is a Creole language. This is due to what I refer to as an epistemological blind spot emerging from what colonial and neo-colonial education determine to be (real) knowledge, and how those ideological systems designate the languages that are the vehicles of ‘real’ knowledge.
Given their historic low status, Creole languages like Jamaican, Haitian Creole, Barbadian, are therefore not seen as proper receptacles of knowledge. In an attempt to unpack the philosophy of language that drives this state of affairs, I explore the historical roots of these views, and the ways in which they undermine and stunt the production, dissemination, and development of indigenous forms of knowledge.” – Dr. Joseph T. Farquharson, Coordinator, Jamaican Language Unit
FORMATIONS is a public events series which foregrounds under-represented artists, writers, thinkers, and activists, run by NTU’s Postcolonial Studies Centre and Bonington Gallery.
Click here to reserve your spot at this free online event.
Biographies:
Dr. Joseph T. Farquharson is a Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at The University of the West Indies, Mona. Dr. Farquharson holds B.A. in Linguistics and Spanish and a Ph.D. in Linguistics from UWI, and an M.Phil. in European Literature (Spanish) from the University of Cambridge. He has been serving as the Coordinator of the Jamaican Language Unit (JLU) since August 2019 and is currently a member of the Communication & Information Advisory Committee of the Jamaica National Commission for UNESCO, and the Convenor of the subject panel for CAPE Communication Studies.
Ramisha Rafique is a PhD studentship funded PhD candidate at Nottingham Trent University. Her creative-critical doctoral thesis explores the ontology of the postcolonial flâneuse, considering class, language, religion, and global technological advancements. Her research interests include Islamophobia, British Muslim women’s writing, and flânerie.
Join Bonington Gallery’s Director, Tom Godfrey for a relaxed lunchtime tour of our current exhibitions, Somewhere Else Entirely by Emily Andersen in our Gallery, and Nottingham Women’s Centre in our Vitrines.
• The event is free to attend with limited capacity.
• Booking is required.
• Please meet in the Bonington Foyer at 12.55 pm for a prompt start.
• The event will last up to an hour, within the gallery.
Join Bonington Gallery’s Deputy Curator Joshua Lockwood-Moran for a relaxed lunchtime tour of our current exhibitions, Somewhere Else Entirely by Emily Andersen in our Gallery, and Nottingham Women’s Centre in our Vitrines.
• The event is free to attend with limited capacity.
• Booking is required.
• Please meet in the Bonington Foyer at 12.55 pm for a prompt start.
• The event will last up to an hour, within the gallery.