Jemma Desai is a writer, convener, and artist searching for dialogue and communion through processes of clarification and complication.
Her practice spans film, performance and visual arts, journeying to form via a catalogue of methods from seemingly disparate disciplines. (At the heart of my practice is a wound which is also an attunement: to how power and permission meet in what is disclosed, made vulnerable, or protected.) She understands her engagement with interdisciplinarity as Ruth Wilson Gilmore describes abolition: "deliberately everything-ist; it's about the entirety of human-environmental relations." (I am a daughter and a mother searching for arrangements that hold.)
Engaging mediums such as video, poetry, performance writing and collage, her work is interested in forms of gathering, assemblage and circulation: of voices, people, ideas, and ways of knowing across difference. Interested in the interplays between artistic form, formal choice, formats and reformist impulses, she thinks through form as produced in precarious terrain: a political and aesthetic choice affected by conditions not always chosen or acknowledged, but claimable through an intentional interrogation of the relationship the work proposes to its audience or constituency. (In conflict with certainty and the seduction of repair, my practice is constantly encountering hesitancy and doubt and is curious about this unsteadiness as a necessary condition of coalition.) These interests are underpinned by a commitment to decolonial, black feminist and abolitionist scholarship and praxis and an ongoing negotiation of the gap between intention and practice in imagining, making and circulating culture.
Jemma has worked as film programmer, manager, board member, consultant, curator, convener and resident artist with institutions including the BFI, British Council, LUX, and Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival and BlackStar Film Festival. She has presented her work internationally at places such as IDA (Los Angeles), SAVVY Contemporary (Berlin), OCA Norway and Forum Lenteng (Jakarta). She was Programmer-in-Residence at The Flaherty Seminar (2023–25) where she developed an unrealisable seminar entitled Yearning.
Current collaborations include Somerset House Studios (artist) and Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York (inaugural Experience Fellow), where she is working on a performance research project supported in part by an RSC Interdisciplinary Fellowship. With Gina Duncan, she is working on an multidisciplinary project funded by the Mellon Foundation engaging histories of Black feminist cultural production in the United States. Alongside teaching in academic and non-academic contexts, she is currently completing practice-based doctoral research exploring how abolitionist praxis might function as both form and infrastructure in cultural production.
London, UK
jemmadesai.com
jemmadesai at gmail dot com
.