presencing
I Am Not a Performance Artist I have a problem with the name "performance." …If pressed to describe what I do, I'd say that I am writing in space. I guess that comes from being trained as a writer … But I was never able to accommodate to the linearity of writing. Perhaps I'm too conscious of the stages I've lived through and the multiple personalities I contain. I think I'm also too aware of the interstices between consciousness and the unconscious …The fact is, except for the lyric poem, writing is the art form most closely bound to time; but to layer information the way I perceived it, I needed the simultaneity I could only obtain in space.
— Lorraine O’Grady1
Abolition, to me, is an attitude ... a theory of change, and an absolutely practical politics. It's an attitude about how you think about the world you're in ... It's not just an absence, it's a presence.
— Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Drawing on sensorial experiences of navigating hostile spaces I have become interested in the ambivalence between institutional presentation and embodied presence.
I wonder what holding with others, rather than withholding the discomfort generated from this ambivalence might reveal about what is possible between self and other.
In my work I use performance and somatic techniques to think about the possibilities of bodily presence and intuition in systems and institutions that devalue desire, intimacy and vulnerability. Starting from honouring desire for reciprocity, even in hostile spaces, my interests ripple out into formations which require audience participation and presence in order to actualise. I think through these formations by refusing the disavowal of doubtful pauses, trembling voice, and feelings of alienation in spaces which usually demand their mastery, and through gestures of relational intimacy when speaking in spaces, or of subjects designed for professionalised, transactional or abstracted presentation.
Current I am a practice-based PhD candidate at Central School of Speech and Drama exploring abolitionist praxis as form and infrastructure in cultural production. For this project, I am developing a performance connecting knowledge, desire, and the social constructs of the trembling body. What might the body’s capacity for this movement have to teach us about the social and relational conditions necessary for the kind of transformation that abolition invites us to imagine?
Ongoing Tremblement/Intifada A work-in-progress that departs from practice research into therapeutic tremoring techniques which unwind tension and trauma long held in the body to open out possibilities of new ways to live never before imagined. By thinking through different forms of embodied knowledge and their social construction, the workshop invites us to consider the materiality of abolitionist relation. What does the interdependence of our somas in creating such a movement (the tremor will not activate unless the body intuits the conditions of safety) have to teach us about the conditions necessary for the transformation of interpersonal and collective relations?
A Work in Progress was presented at Hospitalfield in October 2024 as part of
Study Day on The Voice
organised with Adam Benmakhlouf
What do we want from each other after we have told our stories What do we want from each other after we have told our stories is an iterative performance that explores liveness, desire, and the possibilities of social relation through the infrastructures of cultural production. The project began from two strands of research - one into mothering across racial and cultural differences and another into racism and institutionalised work practices. Each iteration takes Audre Lorde's poem They are no honest poems about dead women as an anchor to situate the curatorial as sitting in a set of lineages that reify and institutionalise care into patriarchal production but fail to actualise its feminist praxis.
Public Intimacies: Autoethnography As Refusal, ICAAn earlier iteration of What do we want from each other after we have told our stories from January 2020 where I explored the idea of public intimacy by thinking about the conditions in which I wanted to read texts I had written which would end up forming the most intimate parts of This Work isn’t For Us. Using my fee to buy all of the seats in the cinema, I invited trusted friends to witness the work. It continued in August 2020 as a video work reflecting on the circulation and receipt of This Work isn’t For Us.
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In conversation after screening Yearning as Method Notes on Programming Latifah and Himli’s Nomadic Uncle at OCA with Mike Sperlinger
Yearning as Method: Notes on programming
Latifah and Himli's Nomadic Uncle A performance and letter writing workshop for cultural workers at The Office of Contemporary Arts Oslo (OCA) ReadListen
Notes on insufficiency
(ON FRICTION AND THE UNDERTAKING OF THE PEARL)
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Ground Provisions
A reading for the closing weekend of LABO*R, inspired by Stefano Harney and Tonika Sealy Thompson’s text of the same name which instigates an integrative space to undertake the necessary root-working to grow ground provisions. Ground provisions as in relational resources, infrastructure, tools, and value systems needed for cultural work claim its autonomy and locality. Details
Public Intimacies: CorrespondencesA Programme of Films by filmmaker Alia Syed along with readings with artist Jasleen Kaur.
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Jemma Desai on I am DoraInstitute of Contemporary Arts
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As We Are Giving We Are Receiving Jemma Desai & Barby Asante
12 Hour Sit-in Revel
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Conversation with Zarina Muhammad This Work Isn't For Us
Part 1, Online Event at LUXWatch
Conversation with Aditi Jaganathan This Work Isn't For Us
Part 2, Online Event at LUXWatch
Conversation with Rabz LansiquotThis Work Isn't For Us
Part 3, Online Event at LUX
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Conversation with Jamila ProwseLight+ Collective Imaginings, Episode 2
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Hear, Now. Episode 13: Artists' Film International 2021: Care
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Conversation with Imran PerrettaChisenhale Gallery
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