An evening of performance and film exploring creative responses to living with illness.

Khairani Barokka will perform her poem Sliding Scale alongside extracts from her recently published Indigenous Species (2016), a Braille and text poetry-art book addressing issues of pollution, consumerism and habitat destruction. Alice Hattrick will read new writing on unexplained illness and familial influence. Raisa Kabir will present a new iteration of ‘You and I are more alike.…’, an intimate weaving performance mapping the intensive labour of textile production; healing trauma held in the body, disability, connection and kinship. Richard Fung’s Sea in the Blood (2000) will be screened, a personal documentary about living with illness, tracing the relationship of the artist to thalassemia in his sister Nan, and AIDS in his partner Tim. 

The event is accompanied by food and drink from Reader's Digestion, A Health Zine, edited by Caspar Heinemann and Holly White.

To reserve your place, please click here.

Khairani Barokka is a writer, poet and artist based in London. She is creator of, among others, solo deaf-accessible poetry-art show Eve and Mary Are Having Coffee and poetry-art book Indigenous Species (Tilted Axis Press, December 2016), is co-editor with Ng Yi-Sheng of HEAT: A Southeast Asian Urban Anthology (Buku Fixi Publishing, 2016), and co-editor, with Sandra Alland and Daniel Sluman, Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back (Nine Arches Press, May 2017). A PhD-by-practice researcher at Goldsmiths, as an LPDP Scholar in Visual Cultures, Okka’s first full-length poetry collection, Rope, will be published by Nine Arches Press in October 2017.

Richard Fung is an artist and writer born in Trinidad and based in Toronto. His single-channel and installation works, which include My Mother’s Place (1990), Sea in the Blood (2000), Jehad in Motion(2007), Dal Puri Diaspora (2012) and Re:Orientations (2016), have been screened internationally and broadcast in Canada, the United States and Trinidad and Tobago. He is the co-author with Monika Kin Gagnon of 13: Conversations on Art and Cultural Race Politics (Artextes Editions, 2002) and Professor in the Faculty of Art at OCAD University, Toronto. In 2015, Richard received the Kessler Award from CLAGS: Center for LGBTQ Studies at the City University of New York.

Alice Hattrick is a writer and producer based in London. She is currently working on a book about unexplained illness and mother-daughter relationships, titled Ill Feelings.

Caspar Heinemann is an artist, writer and poet based in Berlin. They are interested in queer mysticism, experimental poetics, and countercultural aesthetics. Recent events include readings at the Serpentine Miracle Marathon, Basis voor Actuele Kunst, Utrecht, and Kunsthal Aarhus, Denmark. They have recently exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, David Roberts Art Foundation, London, and Kevin Space, Vienna. Their first book, a homo-pastoral epic poem set in a near-future Thames Estuary, is forthcoming from Vile Troll Books.

Raisa Kabir is a multi-disciplinary artist, weaver and writer, who uses contemporary textiles, sound, video and performance to translate and visualise concepts around the politics of cloth, labour and identity. Trained in textile design as a weaver at Chelsea College of Art; she now works from her studio in Limehouse, East London. Raisa’s practice involves ‘weaving’ in performances and workshops, such as continuous warping on a large scale to embody the performative labours associated with art production and the gendered queer brown body. Recent work with the Whitworth Gallery, Manchester and on textile residency in Oaxaca, Mexico has been developed to use handspun cotton yarn as the art material itself, and to focus on the object of labour; in rewinding, and unwinding. Partly highlighting the continual global reliance on racialised labour in mass production and the ways craft in textiles is valued differently depending on where it is made or who it is produced by.

Holly White is an artist living and working in London. Her work involves digital media, sculpture, text, performance and video and she is one half of music project Goth Tech. White graduated from an MA in Material and Visual Culture at UCL, London in 2014. Recent solo exhibitions include I need your love is that true, Jupiter Woods, London and I’m always lazy when I miss you, AND/OR, London.

Image: Raisa Kabir, 'You and I are more alike…’, performance documentation, Whitworth Art Gallery, 2016. Photo by David Oates.