Systems Reclaimed is a multi-season project our team is delivering focused on systemic inequality. The project aims to create a platform for creative practitioners to highlight and interrogate specific manifestations of systemic inequality both within and beyond the arts. We will create a sustained and poly-vocal focus on the ways in which inequality is fostered and perpetuated by and within our institutions and within our social fabric.
The first three seasons of the Systems Reclaimed Project will be curated by Daljinder Johal, Dhelia Snoussi and Orsod Malik.
Dhelia Snoussi’s digital programme for Systems Reclaimed will explore how systemic inequality in the UK can be traced through music history. The season will take as its point of departure a small creative action that took place in West London in 2015 entitled “Mock the Opera”. Mock the Opera was a procession which departed from North Kensington and ended at the Holland Park Opera. The action was organised to protest the disproportionate subsidy received by the local opera in contrast to the disinvestment in local public services at the time, particularly in the less affluent North of the borough. When marchers arrived at Holland Park with drums and placards in hand, they were met with considerable police presence guarding the opera house. However, much to the confusion of police and nervous opera-goers, the marchers held a minute’s silence outside the opera house to commemorate those services and assets that had been lost to lack of funding.
Dhelia will use this creative action as the spine of the digital season and as a starting point from which to look at how patterns of investment in music mirror wider inequality in society. The season will work with residents, musicians, activists and historians from North Kensington to explore this event in local cultural history, and will use the action as a point of departure to explore themes of sound, silence, regeneration and congregation.
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For Systems Reclaimed, Daljinder Johal will produce an audio series that shares LBT women, intersex and non-binary people’s journey to parenthood with audio stories capturing their own voices as they share their experiences with listeners. The series will invite you to cast your eyes across a wall of family portraits and hear their stories.
Daljinder is extending an OEPN CALL to invite Lesbian, Bisexual and Trans women or non-binary, intersex people to share insight about their journey to parenthood. Expressions of interest are welcomed from those with other experiences of underrepresentation, including being working-class, a global majority/migrant background or having a disability. Pivotal questions for participants are: How was your experience of medical support? Was it easy navigating the workplace? Or are you currently on this journey and juggling worries about the threat of climate change and economic chaos?
To submit an expression of interest for this open call, please send a short email about yourself to Daljinder at hello@littlestitchproductions.com by 17 December 2022. Participants will be offered a stipend for their time.
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Orsod Malik will be developing his archival activation project entitled, Shifting the Centre which is dedicated to excavating the radical observations, emancipatory dreams, and revolutionary practices of anticolonial thinkers to develop counter approaches that can be applied to artistic, teaching, and organisational work. By repositioning the centre away from Europe, we can ask: what realisations occur when those resisting dominant forces are the protagonists of world history?
The project locates connections between seemingly unrelated events, people, issues and objects as a way of rejecting a single vantage from which to understand, tell and mobilise histories. Shifting the Centre seeks to widen the scope through which histories are told by listening to what is being silenced with as much intent as to what is audible.
The first iteration Shifting the Centre: Grenada as Reference displayed archival materials relating to the Grenadian Revolution (1979-1983) hosted by the Black Cultural Archive in Brixton from 16 March – 4 June 2023. The exhibition is an invitation 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 second iteration Shifting the Centre: Anticolonial Ways of Seeing 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. The exhibition runs from 26 September 2023 – 12 January 2024.
Orsod is a UK-based Sudani curator, writer, content producer and digital strategist. He is the founder of @code__switch an archive/continuum of radical internationalism dedicated to drawing links between anticolonial struggles and thought across space and time. Orsod’s curatorial practice focuses on developing methods to explore cultural and political entanglements found in the materials he works with. Orsod is ICF’s Curator, the Programme Curator at the Stuart Hall Foundation, and was the 2021 Archivist-in-Resident at the Library of Africa and the African Diaspora (LOATAD).
People:
Systems Reclaimed is a multi-season project our team is delivering focused on systemic inequality. The project aims to create a platform for creative practitioners to highlight and interrogate specific manifestations of systemic inequality both within and beyond the arts. We will create a sustained and poly-vocal focus on the ways in which inequality is fostered and perpetuated by and within our institutions and within our social fabric.
The first three seasons of the Systems Reclaimed Project will be curated by Daljinder Johal, Dhelia Snoussi and Orsod Malik.
Dhelia Snoussi’s digital programme for Systems Reclaimed will explore how systemic inequality in the UK can be traced through music history. The season will take as its point of departure a small creative action that took place in West London in 2015 entitled “Mock the Opera”. Mock the Opera was a procession which departed from North Kensington and ended at the Holland Park Opera. The action was organised to protest the disproportionate subsidy received by the local opera in contrast to the disinvestment in local public services at the time, particularly in the less affluent North of the borough. When marchers arrived at Holland Park with drums and placards in hand, they were met with considerable police presence guarding the opera house. However, much to the confusion of police and nervous opera-goers, the marchers held a minute’s silence outside the opera house to commemorate those services and assets that had been lost to lack of funding.
Dhelia will use this creative action as the spine of the digital season and as a starting point from which to look at how patterns of investment in music mirror wider inequality in society. The season will work with residents, musicians, activists and historians from North Kensington to explore this event in local cultural history, and will use the action as a point of departure to explore themes of sound, silence, regeneration and congregation.
_
For Systems Reclaimed, Daljinder Johal will produce an audio series that shares LBT women, intersex and non-binary people’s journey to parenthood with audio stories capturing their own voices as they share their experiences with listeners. The series will invite you to cast your eyes across a wall of family portraits and hear their stories.
Daljinder is extending an OEPN CALL to invite Lesbian, Bisexual and Trans women or non-binary, intersex people to share insight about their journey to parenthood. Expressions of interest are welcomed from those with other experiences of underrepresentation, including being working-class, a global majority/migrant background or having a disability. Pivotal questions for participants are: How was your experience of medical support? Was it easy navigating the workplace? Or are you currently on this journey and juggling worries about the threat of climate change and economic chaos?
To submit an expression of interest for this open call, please send a short email about yourself to Daljinder at hello@littlestitchproductions.com by 17 December 2022. Participants will be offered a stipend for their time.
_
Orsod Malik will be developing his archival activation project entitled, Shifting the Centre which is dedicated to excavating the radical observations, emancipatory dreams, and revolutionary practices of anticolonial thinkers to develop counter approaches that can be applied to artistic, teaching, and organisational work. By repositioning the centre away from Europe, we can ask: what realisations occur when those resisting dominant forces are the protagonists of world history?
The project locates connections between seemingly unrelated events, people, issues and objects as a way of rejecting a single vantage from which to understand, tell and mobilise histories. Shifting the Centre seeks to widen the scope through which histories are told by listening to what is being silenced with as much intent as to what is audible.
The first iteration Shifting the Centre: Grenada as Reference displayed archival materials relating to the Grenadian Revolution (1979-1983) hosted by the Black Cultural Archive in Brixton from 16 March – 4 June 2023. The exhibition is an invitation 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 second iteration Shifting the Centre: Anticolonial Ways of Seeing 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. The exhibition runs from 26 September 2023 – 12 January 2024.
Orsod is a UK-based Sudani curator, writer, content producer and digital strategist. He is the founder of @code__switch an archive/continuum of radical internationalism dedicated to drawing links between anticolonial struggles and thought across space and time. Orsod’s curatorial practice focuses on developing methods to explore cultural and political entanglements found in the materials he works with. Orsod is ICF’s Curator, the Programme Curator at the Stuart Hall Foundation, and was the 2021 Archivist-in-Resident at the Library of Africa and the African Diaspora (LOATAD).
Dates:
1 Nov 2022 - Ongoing
Location:
Online
