you feel me_ exhibition artist Anna Bunting-Branch invites participants to an evening of encounters with works that play with our feelings: touching, engaging, immersing, provoking….

Drawing inspiration from poetry, animation, science fiction and fandom, ~all the feels~ seeks to open up a space for experience and exchange. Incorporating discussion between artists including Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Aliyah Hussain, Tarek Lakhrissi, Kiara Mohamed and Rebekah Ubuntu, the event asks what it means to move and be moved. How do affective gestures, artistic and otherwise, shape our sense of being in the world?

SPEAKERS

ANNA BUNTING-BRANCH is an artist and researcher based in London. Recent solo presentations include Warm Worlds and Otherwise, Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge (2018) and The Labours of Barren House, Jerwood Space, London (2017). Selected group presentations and publications include you feel me_, FACT, Liverpool (2019); Fandom as Methodology, Goldsmiths Press (2019) ; Waking the Witch: Old Ways, New Rites, UK venues (2018-2019); POEKHALI!, Bergen Kunsthall (2018); ‘More generous and more suspicious’- Feminist SF as a worldbuilding practice, MAP Magazine (2018); figure, feels, fantom, Art Licks, Issue 22 (2018); Hauntopia/What If?, The Research Pavilion, Venice (2017); I AM SF, CCA Derry~Londonderry (2017); Witchy Methodologies, ICA, London (2017). Anna is currently undertaking a practice-related PhD at Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, supported by the AHRC London Arts & Humanities Partnership. In 2019 she was awarded an Arts Council England Project Grant. Moving between different practices – including painting, writing and animation – her work explores science fiction as a methodology to re-vision feminist practice and its histories.

TAREK LAKHRISSI is a visual artist, poet and writer based in Paris. His works have been exhibited in Auto Italia South East (London, UK), Hayward Gallery (London, UK), Palais de Tokyo (Paris, France), FIAC (Paris, FR), Gulbenkian Foundation (Paris, France), Lafayette Anticipations (Paris, France), La Galerie (Noisy-Le-Sec, France), Bétonsalon (Paris, France), La Gaité Lyrique (Paris, France), Artexte (Montreal, Canada), Šiuolaikinio meno centras/CAC (Vilnius, Lithuania), Kim? (Riga, Latvia), Wendy’s Subway (Brooklyn, US), Zabriskie (Geneva, CH). His work will be featured in the 22nd Biennale of Sydney (2020) and he’s currently working on a performative project called Mowgli with Sorour Darabi (Premiere Spring 2020, KFDA, Brussels (BE)).

DANIELLE BRATHWAITE-SHIRLEY is an artist working predominantly in animation, sound and performance to communicate their experience as a Black Trans person. Their practice focuses on recording the lives of Black Trans people, intertwining lived experience with fiction to imaginatively retell Trans stories. Spurred on by a desire to meet buried bodies like theirs, their work dreams of a Trans archive where Black Trans people could share their experiences. Throughout history, Black queer and Trans people have been erased from the archives. Because of this it is necessary not only to archive our existence, but also the many creative narratives we have used and continue to use to share our experiences.

ALIYAH HUSSAIN’s practice approaches themes found within feminist science fiction literature, in particular the possibilities of co-sharing space in domestic or social settings. She works with abstract forms and uses these to construct narratives in order to explore different modes of communication and miscommunication. With a background in performance and an interest in process and material, her work moves across sound, ceramic sculpture, drawing and collage.

REBEKAH UBUNTU is a multidisciplinary sound artist whose creative and scholarly practices explore futurity, rebellion and longing through voice, performance, live art, installation, text and the moving image. The visual component of their collaborative work mixes the aesthetics of archival material, live action and animation, both traditional and computer-generated, while the sonic component fuses African-diasporic rhythms with Noise, Industrial and Avant-Pop influences. Radical transfeminist perspectives foreground their utopian visions of a future where Black, queer, trans and disabled people can thrive free from white supremacist and patriarchal oppression. Their works have featured at BBC Radio 1, Wellcome Collection, Barbican Centre, Tate Modern, Tate Britain, New Art Exchange, London’s Serpentine Galleries and European arts institutions. Most recently, their work was selected for exhibition by New Art Exchange as part of their NAE Open programme.

KIARA MOHAMED is a multidisciplinary artist based in Liverpool. She works with photography (including drone photography), filmmaking and poetry. Her work focuses on the under-representation and marginalisation of minority groups, particularly the challenges faced by black women in society. Her art is primarily concerned with addressing the intersections of race and gender, particularly in relation to forms of community and social responsibility. Kiara's work has been displayed in the Tate Liverpool, the British Museum, OUTPUT Gallery, The Slavery Museum, FACT and at the 2018 Independents Biennial. Kiara’s recent production, 'Black Flowers', is a short film focusing on Liverpool’s colonial cultural history. Set in Liverpool’s Town Hall, it explores how black artists can intervene in historically white spaces to shape their inclusion and equality.