Image credit: Rehana Zaman, Your Ecstatic Self, 2019. Courtesy of Rehana Zaman.
Priya Jay and Rehana Zaman, ‘Research as Ceremony’*
Workshop: Monday 21 June, 18.00-20.00
The Art Research Garden, 43 Lewisham Way, SE14 6NW, entrance on Parkfield Road
For the workshop ‘Research as Ceremony’, Priya Jay and Rehana Zaman will be thinking aloud together about the gardens they know, the gardens they knew and the gardens they are. Together, they recount the day of filming for Your Ecstatic Self (2019), spent in Rehana’s allotment, planting hyssop, chamomile and burning bay. They will discuss spatio-temporal disruptions, ceremony as a process of encounter and lucid dreaming in green spaces. *The title of this workshop is gratefully borrowed from Shawn Wilson’s critical scholarship on indigenous research methodology.
Priya Jay is an artist whose practice involves writing, curating, study and somatics. Her research interests are rooted in embodied knowledge, grief, re-enchantment and technologies of healing. She takes cracks in the archives as her point of departure and arrival, experimenting with what wants to emerge or stay hidden. Priya’s recent work has centred on grief with Fevered Sleep, MAIA Group, Patchwork Archivists and Glasgow Zine Library, happiness with the Wellcome Collection and care work with Auto Italia.
Rehana Zaman is a London-based artist whose practice is concerned with the effect of multiple social dynamics on how individuals and groups relate. These narrative-based pieces, often deadpan and neurotic, are frequently generated through conversation and collaboration with others. Her working process varies with each project, from conventional production methods with a crew and actors, to 3-D animation, to collaboration with researchers, activist groups, members of the public and her family, or a combination of many of these processes at once. A driving question within Zaman’s work is how social political concerns, in addition to providing content, can structure how an artwork is produced. To this extent she has sought to apply methods influenced by radical pedagogy, as in the writings of Paulo Freire, and psychosocial dynamics rooted in Black feminist thought. Zaman is a founding member of the Women of Colour Index Reading group and is frequently invited to devise and deliver workshops, talks and events for groups and organisations. Zaman’s solo exhibitions include Studio Voltaire, London; Material Art Fair IV, Mexico City and The Tetley, Leeds. Her work was also part of group exhibitions in Eastside Projects, Birmingham; Whitechapel, London; Serpentine Galleries, London and Syndicate, Cologne, among others.
What Can A Garden Be?
Lecture and research methods workshops programme 2020-2021
In this series of talks and seminars funded by CHASE, we hear from artists, curators, activists and researchers whose work is grounded in practices of sustainability, decoloniality, permaculture, queering nature, nurturing place-based knowledge, building community and resilience in opposition to colonial imaginaries. The lectures provide the stimulus for PhD workshops addressing key research methods, such as working with ephemeral infrastructures, decolonial strategy, transdisciplinary research that challenges art–science divisions, knowledge sharing, mapping and more-than-human collaborations. In so doing, the series aims to critically address the coloniality of the garden and its role in dispossession and segregation, recalling the etymology of the word ‘garden’ and its roots in the Old English word geard, meaning enclosure. Developing an Art Research Garden at Goldsmiths in the midst of global climate emergency, ecological breakdown and a pandemic that has accelerated racialised policing of green spaces, raises crucial questions about the histories of exclusion and extraction that the Western colonial garden has maintained, be it in the form of pleasure parks, private gardens, nature reserves or botanical gardens. From provision grounds to indigenous land pedagogies, from urban community gardens and allotment plots to the olive grove as place of gathering to share knowledge, and from re-wilding projects and to climate justice work, what are the compelling examples of practices that can we look to in thinking about what a garden could be?
A New Art Research Garden at Goldsmiths
The Art department has initiated plans for an Art Research Garden that will operate as a micro-context from which to observe change in our natural environment, and facilitate a wide range of artistic research into living systems, cultivation and processing of plants, from food to pigments, rewilding, soil care, composting, the benefits of plants in alleviating pollution, eco-pedagogy, and the therapeutic and social benefits of gardening, as well as a space for teaching and public engagement through workshops, performance and other events. The Art Research Garden will support ecological artistic research and teaching, knowledge transfer and public engagement, including outdoor and indoor growing, cooking facilities and a teaching space, all with disabled access. It will provide an experimental laboratory for developing new forms of artistic research that build creativity, resilience and innovation in sustainability in the context of the ecological emergency we face.
Other event part of the series