Creative Practice
I frequently collaborate with artists and designers, using creative and participatory methods as part of my research. Find some recent examples below.
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Municipal Kitchens
I am co-curating this international group exhibition which will show at nGbK in Berlin summer 2024.
Artists and collectives from Mexico, South Africa, the Netherlands, UK, and Germany will show their work and hold workshops with local food activists on rethinking food as a public service. In addition, there will be weekly communal meals open to the public.
The new nGbK space is in a former McDonald’s at Alexanderplatz, a great venue for hosting art, activism and discussions on de-privatising food in the city.
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Found Cities, Lost Objects
I developed the guide for this exhibition on women in urban space, curated by Turner Prize-winning artist Lubaina Himid. The exhibition is made up of works from the Arts Council Collection including pieces by some of my favourite artists, like Sophie Calle, Mona Hatoum and Tai Shani. Since 2022, it has been shown in Birmingham, Southampton and Bristol. It opens at Leeds Art Gallery in December 2023.
Watch a discussion between myself and co-curator Beth Hughes about the exhibition here.
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Another Provision
Another Provision is my collaborative creative/research practice with installation artist Johann Arens. We apply public art strategies to explore questions of urban participation, especially the inclusive design of public services and spaces.
Between 2021 and 2024, we worked with people affected by food injustice to build a mobile installation that serves as an infrastructure for community meals. Since then, we have taken the installation on a tour to various communal art and food venues around London and the UK.
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Collaboration with Khaled Jarrar
For the past ten years, I’ve been in ongoing conversation with Palestinian artist Khaled Jarrar.
I have published several texts about his work, including The Intimacy of Infrastructure (2018) and Bodies on the Line (2014). One of our more recent conversations was just published in the architecture journal Field.
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Art & the toxic politics of waste
In 2020, I organised a screening and led a discussion with the makers of two short films, Waste Underground and Kink Retrograde, hosted by Bertha DocHouse. On the surface, both films deal with landfills – one beneath the West Bank, the other off the coast of Beirut. Yet, in different ways, these two speculative films also engage with the way waste contaminates spaces and its connections to crisis, state power, and the future.
A transcript of the Q&A with filmmakers Bassem Saad and Sophia Stamatopoulou was published in e flux.
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Collaborative site-writing
Together with Ed Charlton and Jill Weintroub, I spent lockdown trialling a remote approach to collaborative site-writing, inspired by the work of Jane Rendell. Based on joint fieldwork on atmospheres of urban exclusion in Johannesburg, we developed an interactive StoryMap website - Situating Urban Atmospheres - to collate our texts, supplemented by photographs I took.
We also published an article reflecting on our research /writing approach in the journal Writingplace.
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Participatory film-making as research
This project considered the role of film-making, not only as a means of disseminating academic research findings, but as a form of research. Residents of Bar Elias, Lebanon, from Lebanese, Palestinian and Syrian backgrounds, made films about the environmental and infrastructural conditions in their town and how these intersect with the refugee crisis.