Talk

An evening with JA Projects and Friends

Storytelling and the city

Thursday 21 March 2024 6.30 - 8.30pm

The Benjamin West Lecture Theatre | Burlington Gardens & digital livestream

£15 / £9 in person, £8 / £5 online

Friends of the RA book first

Join now

Entangled Pasts, 1768–now

Go to the exhibition

Supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies' Digital Accelerator Programme

Join the creatives at the award-winning studio, JA Projects, for a special lecture and discussion exploring the intersection between people, place and time.

Part lecture, part performance, this unique event will use film, audio and installation to creatively explore some of the themes of Entangled Pasts, 1768–now: Art, Colonialism and Change.

Expect innovative presentations from the JA Projects team on their recent work, screenings of specially commissioned films, and performances of audio pieces, interspersed with accounts from the communities which the practice has worked with.

Founded by architect and artist Jayden Ali, JA Projects’ multidisciplinary work covers art, urban strategy, architecture and performance. Their collaborative commission for the Venice Biennale 2023 was awarded a Special Mention for National Participation. They have created large sculptural works, reimagined changing neighbourhoods, designed socially resilient buildings and produced immersive cultural moments.

The studio is also responsible for the design of Entangled Pasts, 1768–now: Art, Colonialism and Change, an exhibition which brings together over 100 major contemporary and historic artworks as part of a conversation about art and its role in shaping narratives of empire, enslavement, resistance, abolition and colonialism.

Speakers:

Yomi Ṣode is an award-winning Nigerian British writer. He is a recipient of the 2019 Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship and was shortlisted for The Brunel International African Poetry Prize 2021.

Alvaro Barrington While Barrington considers himself primarily a painter, his artistic collaborations encompass exhibitions, performances, concerts, fashion, philanthropy and contributions to the Notting Hill Carnival in London. An unwavering commitment to community informs his wide-ranging practice. He has exhibited widely and in May 2024 will be the next artist to create a new installation for the Tate Britain Commission.

Rahemur Rahman is a filmmaker, designer, and academic. Graduating from Central Saint Martins School of Art & Design in 2014, Rahman made history in 2019 being the first British Bangladeshi to show at London Fashion Week. Rahman was nominated for the Change Makers Prize by the British Fashion Council in 2021 for the People Category and is the first British Bangladeshi to be in a fashion exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2022. Rahman's artistic canvas extends to the screen, co-directing documentaries that illuminate the resilience of marginalised communities.

Dr. Thandi Loewenson is an architectural designer and researcher who mobilizes design, fiction, and performance to stoke embers of emancipatory political thought and fires of collective action, and to feel for the contours of other possible worlds. Using fiction as a design tool and tactic, and operating in the overlapping realms of the weird, the tender, the earthly, and the airborne, Thandi engages in projects which question the status-quo, while working with communities, policy makers, artists, and architects towards acting on those provocations. She is a senior tutor at the Royal College of Art, a co-curator of Race, Space, & Architecture, and co-founder of architectural research collectives BREAK//LINE and Fiction, Feeling, Frame.

Rosa-Johan Uddoh is an interdisciplinary artist working towards radical self-love, inspired by Black feminist practice and writing. Through performance, writing, film and multi-media installation, she explores the effects of specific places, objects and characters in popular culture, on self-formation. Rosa is currently a lecturer in Performance: Design and Practice at Central Saint Martins, UAL. Her first book Practice Makes Perfect was published by Book Works and Focal Point Gallery in 2022 and her public artwork 'She is Still Alive!' is currently on show with Southwark Park Galleries.

£15 / £9 in person, £8 / £5 online

Friends of the RA book first

Join now