Free, booking via Eventbrite

Venue: South London Gallery 65 Peckham Road London SE5 8UH

Join the group for a reading event with artist Michelle Williams Gamaker. Williams Gamaker will read two poems by Sally Wen Mao and a chapter from The China Mystique by Karen J. Leong. She will discuss the texts and her wider interests in the politics of race and representation in conversation with artists and researchers Bindu Mehra, Jasmir Creed and Professor Kristen Kreider.

Michelle William Gamaker is an artist working in moving image. She interrogates cinematic artifice, deploying characters as fictional activists to critique the imperialist storytelling in 20th-century Britsh/Hollywood studio films. She is joint-winner of Film London's Jarman Award 2020 and is the recipient of Flamin's Production Award for Thieves (2023), her first film in fictional revenge, premieres at her exhibition Our Mountains Are Painted on Glass at South London Gallery. Its prequel The Bang Straws (2021) premiered at BFI LFF Experimenta, won the best experimental film at Aestehtica's Short Film Festival (2021). Williams Gamakar is a British Academy Wolfson Fellow, researching Fictional Activism as Narrative Reparations.

Chai-Shai British Asian Art (with a focus on South Asian British and East Asian Contemporary Women Artists Practice) research group aims to address under-representation of Asian British Women artists in Britain. Our focus is to shed light on the systematic barriers including racism and misogyny and create thinking spaces that will unpack notions of invisibility and disenchantment through a positive lens, and as a purposeful choice.

Bindu Mehra is an intermedia artist and a PhD candidate at Slade School of Fine Art. She uses drawing, video and sculpture to navigate themes of memory, loss and resilience. Her film, The Inaccessible Narrative' has recently been nominated for the best editor award at Cannes Shorts film festival. Bindu was short-listed for Documenta 14 (independent project) and at Tate Britain, UK 2009. She has exhibited at The Whitworth Gallery in Manchester, UK; Centro de Cultura Contemporanea, Castelo Branco, Portugal; Scope Art Fair, New York, USA; Chaing Mai Museum, Thailand, Alwan for the Art, New York, USA; Blackburn Museum, UK; OZ Asia Festival, Adelaide, Australia, British Council, New Delhi, India and Devi Art Foundation, Gurgaon, India.

Jasmir Creed is a practice-led researcher at the Slade School of Fine Art. She explores alienation and the transcultural in paintings of people in urban non-places or iconic historic sites, informed by her identity as a British Asian artist. Solo exhibitions of paintings by Jasmir Creed include, Urban Forest at Delta House Studios, London 2017; Dystopolis at Victoria Gallery and Museum, Liverpool, 2018 and Utopolis at Warrington Museum and Art Gallery. Group exhibitions include Asia Triennale Manchester 2018. Home and Unhome at Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, Chongking, China 2020 and Art Contact, Istanbul Art Fair, Turkey 2021.

Professor Kristen Kreider is a writer and artist. Her research stems from an interest in the poetics of thought, its materialisation as form and a concern with how artworks relate to the world. In collaboration with the architect James O'Leary, Kristen's artistic practice engages with sites of architectural and cultural interest and they are currently working on a large-scale project, Ungovernable Spaces, engaging with five sites of community resistance globally. Acting primarily as a facilitator for this project, Kristen brings to this her experience working with postgraduate art research at UCL, Oxford and Goldsmith's. Kristen is currently professor of the fine arts and Head of Doctoral Programme at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL.