Harsh Light: Verity Birt, Una Hamilton Helle & Dr Edwin Coomasaru
Wednesday 16 December, 7 – 8:30pm
Online (via Zoom)
Free & open to all
Accompanied by BSL interpretation
* we are currently adding subtitles to the footage above, apologies for any inconvenience.
Bloc Projects is excited to present the second instalment of Harsh Light webinars in December 2020. We will continue to examine how the art worlds have (not) coped in 2020, provide space for solace and solidarity, as well as propose some possible futures.
Harsh Light is becoming more than we could hope for. It is a platform for art workers to strategise and decompress during these sick times. We hold the space with critical and embodied care, inviting honest and at times vulnerable reflections from our peers, friends, and colleagues. Past speakers have already helped us think through anti-racist and climate justice work within institutions, and debunk the monolithic preconceptions that are tethered to disability.
The second instalment continues to use the Arts Council England (ACE) “Let’s Create” strategy as a point of departure. Amidst health, political and ecological crises, how do we feel about this vision to “transform a country by culture”? How, if at all, will ACE’s four investment principles of inclusivity and relevance, ambition and quality, dynamism, and environmental responsibility bring about the (art) worlds we want to have?
Still from Uncommon Ground, 2020, by Verity Birt
The concluding webinar of our December instalment will welcome artists Verity Birt and Una Hamilton, and researcher Dr Edwin Coomasaru in conversation. Variously working on gender, British identity, folklore and the occult, the speakers will be reflecting on the “E” of ACE—Arts Council England—and that which constitutes “Englishness”. The conversation will self-reflexively think through these English textures and their adoption in subcultural contexts, including white supremacist narratives of “blood and soil” nativism, as well as feminist and black metal reinscriptions of a more ecologically entangled landscape.
Content warning: racist and white supremacist language and images will be shown.
This session is a rare and important opportunity, especially for white English and British cultural workers, to take stock of our complex histories. Our hope is to deliberately and carefully encourage this process of self-examination.
About the speakers
Verity Birt
Verity Birt lives in the North Pennines and is a funded, practice-based PhD researcher at Northumbria University and the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art (BxNu) in Newcastle. She has an MA from the Royal College of Art (2015) and BA from Goldsmiths University of London (2011). Situated in intersectional Feminism, Birt’s practice of writing, performance, sculpture, sound and film-making seeks to materialise enchanted encounters and meaningful intimacies between each-other and the more-than-human world. Her PhD is currently titled: 'Re-enchanting the World; a Feminist Sympoiesis' and experiments with collaborative processes of making-with, in search of a recuperative and reparative aesthetics.
Una Hamilton Helle
Una Hamilton Helle is an artist and art worker. Her long term project Becoming the Forest looks at questions around ecology, black metal, belonging and plant sentience through exhibitions, events and a publication series. She has also worked with LARP and worldbuilding as experiments in empathy, embodiment and collaboration with human and non-human entities. As a curator with Legion Projects she curated Waking the Witch, an exhibition which toured Britain in 2018-19. Her most recent artistic projects include an exhibition and LARP for Kim? (Riga), a site-specific sound installation for Waltham Forest Borough of Culture (London), a video essay for New Art Gallery Walsall and a text-based adventure game for Celsius Project Space (Malmö).
Dr Edwin Coomasaru
Dr Edwin Coomasaru is a Research Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre, researching a project on 'Masculinity and Apocalypticism in British Art, 1968-2020'. He was awarded his PhD on gender, sexuality and the legacy of the Northern Irish 'Troubles' (1968-98) in visual culture from the Courtauld in 2018. His 2018-19 Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Courtauld examined representations of gender and race in Brexit's collective imagination. He has contributed to The Irish Times, Irish Studies Review, The Irish Review, Photoworks Annual, Burlington Contemporary, Architectural Review, Source Magazine, and the Barbican’s Masculinities (2020) exhibition catalogue. He co-convenes The Courtauld’s Gender & Sexuality Research Group, and is currently editing a book on Imagining the Apocalypse (Courtauld Books Online).
The webinar will be recorded and available to view via our website following the event.
This event is free but booking is essential.
Becoming the Forest at the edge of Epping Forest, 2019, by Una Hamilton Helle
Bloc Projects is proud to maintain a public programme that is free for everyone. However, attendees are encouraged to donate to the S2 Foodbank, who are carrying out essential work during this time. To donate either follow the link on our homepage or click the button below.
This programme of events has been generously supported by The Sheffield Town Trust