Jemma Desai (CSSD) - 2021-22 Students
jemmadesai@gmail.com

Caring for embodied image making and performance from the ‘margins’  - renarrating histories of racism in the arts through strategies of abolitionist praxis

CResponding to the ways that the global reckonings on structural oppression in 2020 were addressed in the arts sector in the UK, this research confronts divergences between the material demands of the deficit model of disembodied reformist ‘diversity’ in the arts sector, and the strength model of embodied, transformative ‘abolitionist praxis’. This practice led research will both consider the ongoing strategies of artists of colour that have survived and sustained, resisting co-option, despite inequitable, hostile conditions, and develop new curatorial and facilitation strategies to repair and renarrate histories of racism in the arts.