Shifting the Centre

The Reading Group

Date: Tuesday 26 March 2024, 6-7:30pm
Location: HJL’s Dream Space, 352 Holloway Road, London N7 6PA
Presented by: ICF and Stuart Hall Foundation

We invite attendees to bring in a single text, poem, quote, artwork, or excerpt which you associate with the notion of Shifting the Centre or Systems Reclaimed to share and discuss during the open and informal group discussions. If you prefer not to bring your own text, we had included a link to a Miro board which houses all of the texts we’ve explored through the project so far.

This session opens up a space through which we can generate collective consideration of the ways in which critical texts can act as important analytical tools for addressing urgent political realities, such as the colonial systems impacting peoples living in places like Palestine and the Democratic Republic of Congo, through historical readings of revolutions like the ones that took place in Haiti and Grenada.

There will be food available during the event from 6.30pm.

This is an in-person event with limited spaces and registration is essential.

There is scope to make this a monthly event – if you are interested in signing up to attend a Shifting the Centre reading group regularly, with ICF and SHF, please email info@internationalcuratorsforum.org

Anticolonial Ways of Seeing

Dates: 26 Sep 2023 – 12 Jan 2024
Location: iniva, 16 John Islip St, London SW1P 4JU

Curated by: Orsod Malik in collaboration with Beatriz Lobo and Kaitlene Koranteng
Presented by: ICF in collaboration with Institute of International Visual Arts (iniva)
Supported by: Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, Arts Council England and Freelance Foundation

Anticolonialism can be understood as a tradition of thought and action; a transnational counter-politics enacted by peoples resisting the material conditions, structural legacies and ideologies that normalise empire.

Anticolonial Ways of Seeing is the second iteration of ICF’s Shifting the Centre project. It considers the concept of ‘anticolonialism’ as a framework that allows clear links to be drawn between racialisation and capitalism, between past and present-day injustices, and local and global political struggles. The exhibition asks: is a contemporary anticolonial visual language possible? What are its concerns, reference points, and principles? What kinds of demands can it articulate? What sort of education can it provide? What histories does it draw from?

For the exhibition, publications from Stuart Hall Library are placed into dialogue with a variety of materials found in iniva’s archive collection to build a series of constellations. Each constellation draws purposefully tenuous links between ideas, themes, and artistic interventions to posit traces of a shared history that transcend time, place, and rigid notions of racial and national identity. The material on display – exhibition ephemera, photographs, video, texts, excerpts from publications that have underpinned Shifting the Centre – were selected to explore how seemingly disparate ideas, mediums, commitments and histories might come together to constitute a cohesive visual language.

Whether or not we are aware of it, any time we engage in the act of seeing (listening, reading, thinking, creating) we are drawing from epistemological traditions, ways of knowing and perceiving the world. The traditions we draw from determine how we interact with history, how we engage in politics, and relate to our surroundings. Following on from the Shifting the Centre: Grenada as Reference exhibition at Black Cultural Archives, Anticolonial Ways of Seeing is an invitation to consider the relationship between politics and aesthetics, between anticolonialism – as a tradition of thought and action – and the visual arts.

View Exhibition Leaflet

Grenada as Reference

Dates: 16 Mar 2023 – 4 Jun 2023
Location: Black Cultural Archive, 1 Windrush Square, London SW2 1EF

Curated by: Orsod Malik
Presented by: ICF
Supported by: Black Cultural Archives, Esme Fairbairn Foundation, Arts Council England, George Padmore Institute

Grenada as Reference is the first iteration of ICF’s Shifting the Centre project. This exhibition displayed archival materials relating to the Grenadian Revolution (1979-1983) at Black Cultural Archives in Brixton between 16 March – 4 June 2023.

Grenada as Reference invited audiences to think about world history from the vantage point of a small island nation, which was home to the first revolutionary government in the English-speaking Caribbean between 1979-1983. In this relatively brief historical moment, the Grenadian people engaged in a collective process that reoriented their country’s resources, economy, and education away from neo-colonial interests and towards their self-determination.

The archival collections on display are portals into this historical moment. A moment characterised by the emergence of Margret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan’s brand of capitalism. This is known today as neoliberalism – an economic system designed to privatise the public sector and transfer the production of consumer goods to the poorest countries at the cheapest possible cost. It was also a moment marked by international political struggles, from waves of working-class protests in the UK to an antiimperialist revolution in Nicaragua, and the making of a new revolutionary society in Mozambique. It is through the archival materials on display that we can witness how people have/can engage in politics and relate to the world.

This exhibition did not rely on a timeline or lay claim to a single sequence of events. Rather, the exhibit enacted a set of open-ended questions: how can these materials be contextualised? What can be learned from them? What silences do they fill and where do silences remain? Are there teachings from this moment that can be applied to our present? And why isn’t Grenada referenced more widely?

View Exhibition Leaflet