Alongside our current exhibition, Karuppu, join us for a free online in-conversation event between our exhibiting artist Osheen Siva with Jelena Sofronijevic, producer of EMPIRE LINES podcast and Nicole Thiara, researcher of Dalit and Adivasi literature.
Together, they will explore topics related to Osheen’s practice; their inspiration from cultural aesthetics that explore speculative futures and racial identity, including Afrofuturism. Osheen’s work uses science fiction, mythology, and religious heritage amidst their love of comic books and the vibrant soul of South India. Their artworks imagine fantastical dreamscapes, whilst reclaiming and reinventing Indian folktales and myths to imagine a decolonised future.
This event will be live streamed on YouTube, with auto generated closed captions. During the live event there will be the opportunity to ask questions.
Osheen Siva is a multidisciplinary artist from Thiruvannamalai, currently based in Goa. Through the lens of surrealism, speculative fiction and science fiction and rooted in their Dalit and Tamil heritage, Osheen imagines new worlds of decolonised dreamscapes, futuristic oases with mutants and monsters and narratives of queer and feminine power.
Jelena Sofronijevic is a producer, curator, writer, and researcher, who makes content at the intersections of cultural history, politics, and the arts. Beyond their works in print they are the producer of EMPIRE LINES, a podcast which uncovers the unexpected flows of empires through art, and historicity, a new series of audio walking tours, exploring how cities got to be the way they are, recorded on location in London (2022) and Tokyo (2023). Their full portfolio of work is available on their website, and social media.
Follow Jelena on Instagram – @empirelinespodcast, and on Twitter @jelsofron
Nicole Thiara is Co-Lead of Nottingham Trent University’s Postcolonial and Global Studies Research Group and Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded Research Network ‘Writing, Analysing, Translating Dalit Literature’ and its Follow-on Grant ‘On Page and on Stage: Celebrating Dalit and Adivasi Literatures and Performing Arts’. She teaches postcolonial and contemporary literature at Nottingham Trent University, UK. Her area of research is Dalit, Adivasi and diasporic South Asian literature and her current research project focuses on the representation of modernity in Dalit literature.
This event will take place at Nottingham Contemporary.
To correspond with Hollow Earth: Art, Caves & The Subterranean Imaginary all are warmly invited to Channelling Queer Depths: An Evening with Poet Shivanee Ramlochan. Shivanee will give readings from her ground-breaking collection Everyone Knows I am a Haunting (2017), followed by a conversation with PhD queer literary researcher, Tom Lockwood-Moran. A particular point of interest will be Shivanee’s upcoming work of creative non-fiction, Unkillable (2023) how a writer channels their queer self through dangerous, unorthodox and taboo subjects. This event will explore how and why poetry chisels beneath the world’s surface to expose queer depths, particularly informed by Shivanee’s experience of Trinidadian cultures and subcultures.
Free. Booking required.
We are unable to provide British Sign Language interpretation for this event.
This event is partnered with the Formations programme at Bonington Gallery and their free workshop Writing Your Truth with Radical Honesty with Shivanee on Wednesday 16 November.
Find information about getting here and our building access and facilities here.
There are no audio descriptions for this event.
If you have any questions around access or have specific access requirements we can accommodate, please get in touch with us by emailing info@nottinghamcontemporary.org or phoning 0115 948 9750.
Due to COVID precautions, please do not attend this event if you/someone in your household is currently COVID-19 positive, has suspected symptoms, or is awaiting test results.
Staff and visitors are welcome to wear a face covering in all areas.
Shivanee Ramlochan is an Indo-Trinidadian poet, critic, and essayist, whose first poetry collection, Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting (2017), was shortlisted for the 2018 Forward Prize. Ramlochan’s next work, the creative non-fiction Unkillable, is forthcoming from Noemi Press in Autumn 2023. Shivanee is the Book Reviews Editor for Caribbean Beat Magazine and works closely with Bocas Lit Fest, the Caribbean’s largest literary festival.
Tom Lockwood-Moran is a PhD queer literary researcher, funded by Midlands4Cities (AHRC), writing his thesis in English Literature, entitled: ‘Queer Resistance(s): Contemporary Caribbean Communality’. Tom’s project is supervised by experts from both Nottingham Trent University and The University of Leicester. Thomas is currently an Hourly Paid Lecturer in Postcolonial Texts at NTU within English, Culture and Media.
This free, online-in conversation event with writer Gogu Shyamala is part of our Formations series, hosted in partnership with Nottingham Trent University’s Postcolonial Studies Centre. This segment of Formations, CADALFEST, relates to the Celebrating Adivasi and Dalit Arts and Literature Festival (CADALFEST) taking place across India and in Nottingham. CADALFEST is the first international festival series dedicated to artists whose work creatively resists caste discrimination and social exclusion in India.
This event will take start at 4 pm (GMT) and 8.30 pm Indian Standard Time.
Gogu Shyamala will discuss her literary and academic work to mark the republication of her short story collection Father May be an Elephant, and Mother Only a Small Basket, But…, by Tilted Axis Press in March 2022. Her focus on the perspective of Dalit women and children as well as her stories’ celebration of Dalit strength and culture will be explored. Gogu Shyamala will tell us about her choice of, and experimentation with, the short story form, and how she sees her role as writer, academic and activist. We will also discuss land relations and the link to caste, sexual violence, inter-caste love and other key concerns of her fiction and academic writing.
Gogu Shyamala will be in conversation with Sowjanya Tamalapakula, Bethan Evans, Judith Misrahi-Barak and Nicole Thiara and the session will conclude with Q&A with the online audience via YouTube chat.
Tilted Axis is a non-profit press publishing mainly work by Asian writers, translated into a variety of Englishes. Founded in 2015, Tilted Axis are based in the UK, a state whose former and current imperialism severely impacts writers in the majority world. This position informs their practice, which is also an ongoing exploration into alternatives – to the hierarchisation of certain languages and forms, including forms of translation; to the monoculture of globalisation; to cultural, narrative, and visual stereotypes; to the commercialisation and celebrification of literature and literary translation. Tilted Axis values the work of translation and translators through fair, transparent pay, public acknowledgement, and respectful communication. They are dedicated to improving access to the industry, through translator mentorships, paid publishing internships, open calls and guest curation.
Dr. Gogu Shyamala is one of the foremost contemporary Dalit writers in India, as an author, researcher, editor, and biographer writing in Telugu.
Her English collection of short stories, Father may be an elephant and mother only a small basket, but… is a landmark in Indian literature; the collection was also translated into German and some of the short stories into French. She produced an anthology known as Nallapoddu (Black Dawn), which is a collection of 51 Dalit women’s writings (from 1921 to 2002) from across the Telugu-speaking Indian federal states. It has one of critical acclaim in literary world. She wrote a biography of the first Dalit woman legislator, Cabinet member and Endowment Minister in the former state of Andhra Pradesh, India. She worked on domestic violence and Dalit women. She is the co-editor of Anthology of Dalit writing in Telugu published by Oxford University Press. She has participated in the World Conference against Racism, and in literary events in Australia, Germany and Jaipur. Mentoring rural students on access to Higher Education and researching specific causes for dropouts, Gogu Shyamala also made documentary film called Memetla Saduvaale (Merit Interrupted).
Her writings are part of the syllabus in higher education in several Indian states and as well as the University of San Francisco in the USA. Her writings were translated into Indian languages such as Tamil, Malayalam, Hindi, Urdu and Gujarati. She holds a PhD in the area of Dalit Women Biographies, Gender and Caste in Telangana, from the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad. She received several awards including Gandapenderam, she been worked as Research Fellow at Anveshi and as residence fellow at IEA Nantes in France on Dalit folklore and art farms. At present she is working as an independent scholar researching and writing biographies of rural Dalit women. She studies Dalit women’s literature and the history and mythology of Dalit literature as well as collecting palm leaf manuscripts of Dalit Puranas for contemporary scholarly studies.
Sowjanya Tamalapakula holds a PhD in the area of Violence, Gender and Caste from the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad.
Areas of study include gender and intersectionalities with particular emphasis on the issues of Dalit women. She is currently teaching and guiding in the School of Gender Studies at Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Hyderabad. She teaches intersectionalities, sexuality, cinema, media and women’s writing for post-graduate students. She has published in various national and inter-national journals on gender, caste, cinema and media. Her recent paper ‘Caste-ing Queer Identities’ published in NUJS-Law Review journal is a critique on how caste operates in the queer intimate spaces.
Another paper titled ‘Politics of Inter-caste Marriage among Dalits: “Political as Personal”’ has been published in Asian Survey, University of California, Berkeley. She has been invited to contribute a paper ‘“Whatever Happened to Jogta, Jogtin?: Instrumentality of Religion in non-Brahman Cultural Assertion and Marginalization of Dalits’ for the Journal of Critical Philosophy of Race, Penn State University. She contributes regularly to Asian Age, Deccan Chronicle, The Wire, The News Minute, The Citizen, The Print, Youth Ki Awaz, Velivada and Roundtable India.
Bethan Evans is a recently qualified Doctor of Philosophy in English, specialising in black British literature, specifically the black British short story and its position in the publishing industry. Her thesis is titled ‘Publishing Black British Short Stories: The Potential and Place of a Marginalised Form’. Bethan has written articles for the Literary Encyclopedia and the Routledge Companion to Literature and Feminism, and is currently co-editing a special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, due for publication in 2025. She is the Project Officer for ‘On Page and On Stage: Celebrating Dalit and Adivasi Literatures and Performing Arts’.
Judith Misrahi-Barak is Associate Professor at University Paul Valéry Montpellier 3, France, where she teaches English and postcolonial literatures. Her prime areas of specialization are Caribbean and Indo- and Sino-Caribbean literatures in English, diaspora and migrant writing. She has published numerous articles and book chapters in edited collections, among which Tracing the New Indian Diaspora (Om Dwivedi, ed. Rodopi, 2014); Turning Tides: Caribbean Intersections in the Americas and Beyond (Heather Cateau and Milla Riggio, eds. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 2019); or Windrush (1948) and Rivers of Blood (1968): Legacy and Assessment (Trevor Harris, ed. Routledge, 2019). She is General Editor of the series PoCoPages (Pulm, Montpellier). Borders and Ecotones in the Indian Ocean is the latest volume (2020).
http://www.pulm.fr/index.php/collections/horizons-anglophones/pocopages.html
Her latest publications are a chapter on Edwidge Danticat’s short stories (Bloomsbury Handbook on Edwidge Danticat, 2021), an article in a special issue of The Caribbean Quarterly on Sino-Caribbean literature (2021), and Kala pani Crossings: Revisiting 19th century Migrations from India’s Perspective (co-edited with Ashutosh Bhardwaj, Routledge, 2021).
Her monograph entitled Entre Atlantique et océan Indien: les voix de la Caraïbe anglophone was published with Classiques Garnier (Paris, 2021).
Dalit literatures are among her more recent interests, and she was Co-Investigator on an AHRC Research Network series on ‘Writing, Analysing, Translating Dalit Literature’ (2014-16) and is now Co-Investigator on an AHRC Follow-on Funding for Impact and Engagement on ‘On Stage and on Page: Celebrating Dalit and Adivasi Literatures and Performing Arts’ (2020-23).
Caste in Cinema, co-edited with Joshil K. Abraham, is forthcoming with Routledge (November 2022).
Nicole Thiara is Co-Director of Nottingham Trent University’s Postcolonial Studies Centre and Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded Research Network Series, ‘Writing, Analysing, Translating Dalit Literature’ and its Follow-on Grant ‘On Page and on Stage: Celebrating Dalit and Adivasi Literatures and Performing Arts’.
She teaches Postcolonial and Contemporary Literature at Nottingham Trent University, UK. Her area of research is Dalit and diasporic South Asian literature and her current research project is the representation of modernity in Dalit literature.
Her publications include Salman Rushdie and Indian Historiography: Writing the Nation into Being (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), ‘The Colonial Carnivalesque in Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable and Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing 52: 6 (2016), ‘Subaltern Experimental Writing: Dalit Literature in Dialogue with the World’, Ariel 47:1-2 (2016), pp. 253-80, and with Annapurna Waughray, ‘Challenging Caste Discrimination with Literature and Law: An Interdisciplinary Study of British Dalit Writing’, Contemporary South Asia 21:2 (2013), pp. 116-32. With Judith Misrahi-Barak and K. Satyanarayana, she co-edited the critical volume Dalit Text: Aesthetics and Politics Re-imagined (Routledge, 2019) and special issue on Dalit Literature in the Journal of Commonwealth Literature 54 (1), March 2019 with our Open Access editorial ‘Why Should We Read Dalit Literature’ accessible here.
This free, online-in conversation event with multimedia artists Subash Thebe Limbu and Osheen Siva is part of our Formations series, hosted in partnership with Nottingham Trent University’s Postcolonial Studies Centre. This segment of Formations, CADALFEST, relates to the Celebrating Adivasi and Dalit Arts and Literature Festival (CADALFEST) taking place across India and in Nottingham. CADALFEST is the first international festival series dedicated to artists whose work creatively resists caste discrimination and social exclusion in India.
This event will be streamed live on Bonington Gallery’s YouTube channel. Book your free place now.
In recent times, the rapidly changing socio-political, environmental, and technological changes have centralised focus on reimagining and reconfiguring futures. While the Futurism movement, which began in Italy and spread to other European countries, sought to cleave off from the past and prophesized exciting futures through new technologies, futurisms that emerged from the margins were motivated by different urges – to question Eurocentric ideas of progress, development, scientific rationality, and techno futures. Afrofuturism, Latinx Futurism, and different kinds of Subaltern Futurisms have imagined alternate futures through speculative art and fiction by firmly holding on to the past.
In the Indian subcontinent, artists Subash Thebe Limbu and Osheen Siva have conceptualised Adivasi Futurism and Tamil Dalit Futures respectively. This conversation will discuss how they utilise the anti-caste philosophy that guides their multimodal artwork. It will explore how the artists use speculative art to posit alternate futures that resist caste and privilege their identities. The conversation, moderated by Prof. K.A. Geetha and Priteegandha Naik will discuss Dalit and Adivasi futurism and the potential it offers to dream up new and equal futures.
Subash Thebe Limbu is a Yakthung (Limbu) artist from what we currently know as eastern Nepal. He works with sound, film, music, performance, painting and podcast.
Subash has an MA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins (2016), a BA in Fine Art from Middlesex University (2011), and an Intermediate in Fine Art from Lalit Kala Campus, Kathmandu.
His works are inspired by socio-political issues, resistance and science/speculative fiction. Indigeneity, climate change, and Adivasi Futurism are recurring themes in his works.
He is based in Newa Nation (Kathmandu) and London.
Osheen Siva is a multidisciplinary artist from Thiruvannamalai, currently based in Goa. Through the lens of surrealism, speculative fiction and science fiction and rooted in their Dalit and Tamil heritage, Siva imagines new worlds of decolonized dreamscapes, futuristic oasis with mutants and monsters and narratives of queer and feminine power.
K.A. Geetha is an Associate Professor the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, BITS Pilani, Goa Campus, India. Her research interests are Dalit writing, Post-Colonial literatures, Women Studies and Cultural studies. She has worked extensively on the literary production and reception of Tamil Dalit literature.
Priteegandha Naik has submitted her thesis on Dalit-futurism which discussed Dalit Studies, Science Fiction Studies, Science and Technology Studies. She and is currently working as a Research Associate at Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai.
Yesterday we welcomed a fantastic panel of experts to lead a discussion on fashion, art, archives, and everything in between; from the ethics and sustainability of fashion, through to the importance and challenges of maintaining archives and thoughts on interdisciplinary working.
Chaired by Tom Godfrey (Bonington Gallery Curator and curator of CJ), the panel included Naomi Braithwaite (Senior Lecturer in the School of Art and Design at NTU and custodian of the FashionMap Archive), Ruby Hoette (Designer and researcher and Programme Leader of MA Design: Expanded Practice at Goldsmiths University) and Caroline Stevenson (Curator, writer and lecturer and Head of Cultural and Historical Studies at London College of Fashion)
Thanks to all who attended and got involved in the conversation!
C/J is open until Saturday 18 May. If you haven’t already, be sure to drop by!
On the occasion of our current exhibition C/J by Chloé Maratta and Joanne Robertson, please join us for an in-conversation event exploring key themes raised by the exhibition.
The discussion will be chaired by Tom Godfrey (Bonington Gallery Curator and Curator of C/J) and will feature Naomi Braithwaite (Senior Lecturer in the School of Art and Design at NTU and custodian of the FashionMap Archive), Ruby Hoette (Designer and researcher and Programme Leader of MA Design: Expanded Practice at Goldsmiths University) and Caroline Stevenson (Curator, writer and lecturer and Head of Cultural and Historical Studies at London College of Fashion).
We’ll be exploring themes and attitudes relating to the roles of artists and designers within archives; inter/post-disciplinary practice; cultural hierarchies and archives in academia. The intention will be to make the conversation as open as possible and we welcome contributions from the audience throughout the event. Light refreshments will be provided.
Naomi Braithwaite is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Art and Design at NTU where she is part of the Fashion Management Marketing and Communication team. Her research draws from Material Culture to explore the intersections between clothing, shoes and identity. Naomi’s ‘Shoe and Tell’ project examining teenage identity through the lens of footwear, was featured at the Being Human Festival in 2017 and on Radio 4’s Thinking Allowed programme in November 2018.
Led by Naomi, FashionMap is a unique archive of garments and accessories which have been sourced from British High Street retailers since 2000. Naomi’s current research uses FashionMap to explore how a collection of high street garments can become a valuable archive for the future.
Ruby Hoette is a designer/researcher exploring fashion in context through the intersection of theory and practice. Seeking to expand what constitutes ‘fashion practice’, her approach proposes critical and experimental modes of engaging with and producing fashion by framing the garment as a unique artefact that carries traces of social, cultural and economic interactions and transactions. Ruby is a Lecturer in Design at Goldsmiths, University of London where she currently convenes the post-disciplinary programme MA Design Expanded Practice.
Caroline Stevenson is a London-based curator, writer and lecturer. She works closely with emerging and established practitioners and institutions to research and develop new projects and create space for experimentation, dialogue and exchange. She has produced projects and programmed events for Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, V&A Museum, ICA, Arcade East, Tenderbooks, Kunstverein München, Onomatopee, Dutch Design Week and a range of temporary spaces.
Caroline’s research and curatorial work focuses on interdisciplinary practice and artist-led culture. She is co-founder of Modus, a platform for expanded fashion practice, and she publishes scholarly writing on art and design practices.
Caroline is Head of Cultural and Historical Studies at London College of Fashion where she co-runs the Visual Arts at LCF Research Hub and is a member of the Centre for Fashion Curation.
Ahead of his show here at the Gallery in April / May 2015, Simon Callery invited us down to his studio just outside of London. Simon and Gallery Resource Manager Tom Godfrey discuss the process of creating a painting and Simon’s approach to colour, as well as thoughts on collaboration, experimentation and much more.