Trembling Conversations
Trembling Conversations
The Hunterian
Date: Friday 03 May 2024
Time: 14:00 - 19:30
Venue: Kelvin Hall Cinema
Category: Hunterian
Speaker: Various speakers
Website: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/trembling-conversations-tickets-879421261667?aff=oddtdtcreator
The Hunterian exhibition The Trembling Museum, co-curated with Professor Manthia Diawara and Dr Terri Geis, explores new relations between the African art objects in the Hunterian collection and contemporary art.
Talks
2.00pm - 5.00pm
This special event invites contemporary practitioners to offer a range of new perspectives on the exhibition, and on the ideas of Martinican poet-thinker Édouard Glissant which are central to it. Glissant's concepts of 'relation', 'opacity' and 'trembling', developed through his own diasporic perspective on the modern world, have been influential in many contexts and across many forms of creative work. In this event, artists, poets, theatre-makers and creative writers will take The Trembling Museum as a point of departure for presentations, dialogues and new creative responses.
Contributors include: Tawona Sithole, Graham Eatough & Miek Zwamborn; Leo Robinson; Vanessa Onwuemezi and Jelena Sofronijevic.
Graham Eatough is one of Scotland’s leading artists working in theatre, visual art and film. He was Artistic Director of Suspect Culture theatre company from 1996 to 2009 establishing the company as one of the UK’s most innovative groups presenting new work around the world. Since 2007 Graham has worked extensively within the visual arts exploring an interdisciplinary approach to theatricality and performance in collaboration with leading artists such as Graham Fagen, Simon Starling and Stephen Sutcliffe. In theatre, Graham has worked extensively with the National Theatre of Scotland over recent years writing and directing How To Act, a contemporary Greek tragedy set in a theatre masterclass, and creating an adaptation of Naoki Higashida’s book about autism, The Reason I Jump, staged in a specially designed outdoor maze in Glasgow’s West End. In 2015 he directed Lanark: A Life in Three Acts for Edinburgh International Festival and Citizens Theatre which he created with long-time collaborator, the writer David Greig.
Leo Robinson is an artist and musician baased in Glasgow. Leo graduated from the Manchester School of Fine Arts in 2016. His artistic practice runs parallel to his explorations in spirituality, self discovery and folklore. His work begins from meditations upon his own attachments and ideals, before questioning how they mirror the wider external human world. Recent exhibitions include DREAM-BRIDGE-OMNIGLYPH, London Mithraeum, Bloomberg SPACE, London (solo - 2024); Polymythologies, Tiwani Contemporary, London (group - 2024); On Exactitude, Indigo + Madder, London (solo - 2023); The Infinity Card, Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, Wales (2022);To the Edge of Time, KU Leuven, Belgium (2021); Theories of Cosmic Joy, Tiwani Contemporary, London (2019); Odd One Out/In (curated by Other Grounds Collective).
Tawona Sithole is better known as Ganyamatope (his ancestral family name) and is a poet, playwright, storyteller and musician. Tawona seeks to make connections with other people through creativity, and the natural outlook to learn. Educated by assigned teachers through the schooling system, and by natural teachers through ‘pasichigare’, Tawona benefits from having more than one way of knowing/ learning and as a result, finds himself playing many roles in creativity and education. Tawona has been UNESCO artist-in-residence at the University of Glasgow Poet-in-residence of Glasgow Refugee, Asylum and Migration Network (GRAMNET) and Honorary Research Fellow with the school of education at the University of Glasgow since 2013.
Jelena Sofronijevic (@empirelinespodcast, @jelsofron) is a producer, curator, writer, and researcher, who makes content at the intersections of cultural history, politics, and the arts. They are the Contemporary Art Curator at The Box in Plymouth. and they produce EMPIRE LINES, a podcast which uncovers the unexpected flows of empires through art. They also produce 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), and works in print. Their portfolio of work is available on their website, Instagram, and Twitter.
Vanessa Onwuemezi is a writer living in London. She is the winner of The White Review Short Story Prize 2019 and her work has appeared in literary and art magazines, including Granta, Frieze and Prototype. Her debut short story collection, Dark Neighbourhood, was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2021, and was named one of The Guardian's best books of 2021. It was shortlisted for both the Republic of Consciousness Prize and the Edge Hill Prize in 2022 and her short story Green Afternoon was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award 2022. She has written several exhibition texts most recently for SMIIILLLLEEEE, Rachel Jones, Thaddaeus Ropac gallery, 2021, The Exile of Dionysus, Bill Lynch, Brighton CCA, 2022 and The Throat is a Threaded Melody, Kira Freije, E-Werk Luckenwalde, 2023. She was recently the inaugural writer in residence at the Roberts Institute of Art residency.
Miek Zwamborn is an author, translator and artist. Her practice often delves into archival collections, drawing on the suggestive possibility of historical materials, letters, texts, objects and artefacts in order to create semi-factual narratives. Through installations, performances, books and photography, Zwamborn imbues her source material with a rigorous sense of subjective and the speculative. Zwamborn has published the novels Oploper (2000, Meulenhoff) and Vallend Hout (2004, Meulenhoff), the poetry book Het krieken van sepia (2008, Slibreeks), De duimsprong (2013, Van Oorschot) and seaweed anthology Wieren (2018, Van Oorschot).
*Refreshments will be served.*
Screening
5.30pm - 7.30pm
The selected screening programme has been curated to reflect and expand upon the themes of The Trembling Museum.
Manthia Diawara, In Search of Africa, 1997 (17 mins)
Diawara returns to his birthplace of Guinea to revisit his past and to track down his childhood best friend, now a sculptor making copies of traditional African masks for the commercial market.
Karen McKinnon and Caecilia Tripp, Making History, 2008 (9 mins)
A conversation between Édouard Glissant and his friend, the renowned poet Linton Kwesi Johnson.
Alberta Whittle, A Black Footprint is a Beautiful Thing, 2021 (11 minutes)
This film engages with the legacy of colonialism through an exploration of the shipworm. This seemingly insignificant marine organism inadvertently thwarted the progress of European imperialism by consuming the wooden structures of ships deployed in the colonization of the Caribbean.
Manthia Diawara, A Letter from Yene, 2022 (50 mins)
Filmed in the coastal village in Senegal where Diawara lives for part of the year, this film connects global changes (including climate change) to a specific place. The area was traditionally and primarily occupied by fishermen and farmers but has in recent decades been besieged by coastal erosion and uncontrolled urbanisation. The film explores these issues through dialogues with the community.