04/09/2024: You’re invited: John Hansard Gallery performance-lecture + discussion + map-making + fundraising for Palestine

• 18:00 Doors open. Grab a drink. Buy the book at 20% discount.
• 18:30-18:35: People settle down
• 18:35-18:40: Welcome by Woodrow. Housekeeping. Introduction of speakers and format. Reminder that this is an inclusive space.
• 18:40-19:10: Performance-lecture by Kai. Live map-making by MA Arts and Cultural Leadership staff and students.
• 19:10-19:40: Short responses by Jacob and Alastair each. Open discussion between Kai, Jacob, Ali, Woodrow. Questions from the floor. Discussion of mapping.
• 19:40-20:30: Drinks + book signing + map-making.
• 20:30: Doors close – or help us clear up

• Kai Syng Tan (she/they) is an artist-academic-agitator and Associate Professor in Arts and Cultural Leadership at University of Southampton. Kai writes and performs in her personal, hyperactive and tentacular capacity. Website; Instagram @kaisyngtan
• Jacob V Joyce is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice amplifies historical and nourishes new queer and anti-colonial narratives. Their work is continually grounded by collaborations and conversations with activists, community groups and archives.
  • Joyce’s work ranges from afro-futurist world-building workshops to mural painting, comic books and performance art. They are currently a doctoral candidate researching the history of Black British arts education at Westminster University.
  • Joyce has self-published several zines and illustrated international human rights campaigns for Out Proud African LGBTI, Amnesty International, Global Justice Now and had their comics in national newspapers.
  • TFL Arts Grant awardee and former artist in residence at Gasworks, Serpentine, The Museum of Homelessness, Nottingham Contemporary and Tate Galleries Education department, Joyce is a non-binary artist amplifying historical and nourishing new queer and decolonial narratives.
  • Website; Instagram @jacobvjoyce
• Alastair Eales is as an educator, facilitator, and artist who operates at the intersection of museum and charity engagement. In 2001, Ali founded the Trinity Art Group (TAG) under the auspices of the homeless charity Trinity Winchester. Ali’s proudest accomplishment is maintaining this artistic community and collective for over two decades, defying the (capitalist) vagaries top-down model of a rigid, eight-week-only cyclical art education program. This year, they celebrate over 20 years of belonging for some of the TAG members!
  • Ali is in Jean-Luc Nancy’s camp on the notion that a community should be celebrated in and of itself rather than seen as a means to an end. Ali’s thesis, Making Space: Social Practice and Community in Support of Homelessness, delves into ways to dissolve barriers to cultural inclusion and make space (extend geographies of care) for adults who are homeless and/or socially excluded.
  • Making space involves both creation and action. When activities occur within a space, they invigorate it through a dynamic questioning of its purpose, creating pathways for dialogue and transformation. These actions spark conversations that open up new possibilities, forging reappraised spaces and cultivating new communities. This process forms the core of Ali’s workshop approach for community-based social practice with homeless communities.
  • Website; Instagram @alastaireales
• Woodrow Kernohan was born in 1975 in Belfast and grew up in Dorset. He is the Director of John Hansard Gallery, one of the UK’s leading contemporary art galleries, founded in 1979 and part of the University of Southampton, an Arts Council England NPO, and member of the Plus Tate network.
  • Since joining John Hansard Gallery in 2017, Woodrow has led the reimagining of the organisation and relocation, in 2018, from its Highfield campus to a new purpose-built home in Southampton’s city centre.
  • Before joining John Hansard Gallery, he was Director of EVA International, Ireland’s biennial of contemporary art in Limerick from 2011-17, was Curator of the Irish Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015 and was Co-Director of Brighton Photo Fringe with Helen Cammock from 2008-11.
  • Woodrow was also Curator and Co-Director with experimental exhibition space Permanent Gallery, Brighton (2004-11), Exhibitions Curator at restoration project The Regency Town House, Hove (2006-11) and is a member of IBA, the International Biennial Association and IKT, the International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art.
• Jess Willis is Duty Manager of John Hansard Gallery. Jess also looks after the book store and has been the key person in helping to organise the book launch!
• The innovative MA Arts and Cultural Leadership is a one-year programme at the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton. Students learn by engaging with diverse industry partners, concepts and creative practices to understand and shape the role of arts and culture in society as a creative and critical change-making and futures-making practice.  Values around sustainability, equity and belonging, and social justice are embedded throughout the exploration of urgent topics. Through international, decolonial, intersectional and emerging perspectives on arts and cultural leadership, students explore:
  • ethical decision-making, marketing and fundraising practices
  • critical and creative tools to examine power, governance and organising,
  • audience engagement and participation; project management and evaluation
  • the role of arts and culture in advancing discourse and action in social and environmental justice
  • creative health and wellbeing

Visualizing Palestine is a multi-disciplinary team with members who collaborate remotely from Palestine, Egypt, Lebanon and North America. Rasha Sansur on behalf of Visualizing Palestine expresses their appreciation of the fundraising effort. I will be donating the proceeds through their website by making a one-time donation. 100% of the fund will be donated. The starting price is £200. Transportation and packaging of the artwork, if required, will be absorbed by the buyer.

Since October 2023, I have been most of the fees that I have earned from external commissions towards medical and arts and cultural efforts for Palestine including Artists for Palestine, United Nations Relief Work Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and United Palestinian Appeal. Supporting Visualizing Palestine at the occasion of the launch of my book and the mapping Visualizing Palestine is particularly meaningful, given our shared agenda of re-writing dominant narratives and re-dressing power imbalance via counter-mapping.

If you are looking into other ways to support the work of Visualizing Palestine, you can consider becoming a member through a recurring monthly or yearly donation. They have also produced a book VisualizingPalestine: A Chronicle of Colonialism and the Struggle for Liberation which you can purchase.

Download PDF of script here.

Drawing on and applying the big-picture and out of the box-thinking associated with neuro-divergence, Neuro-Futurism and Re-Imagining Leadership : An A-Z Towards Collective Liberation (Kai Syng Tan, Palgrave Macmillan 2024, pre-order here) is a rip-roaring manifesto that introduces ‘neuro-futurism’ as a multi-faceted toolkit, and re-claims ways to think about and do ‘leadership’ as a diversified, beyond-colonial, neuro-queered and (co-)creative change- and future-making practice. Colliding mobilities, neuro-queering, the arts and culture, critical leadership studies, social justice, creative pedagogy, futurity and Daoist cosmology for the first time, the short, sweet and spicy hand-book celebrates the Dangerous, Demeaning and Dirty labour of Deviant/Defiant culture-workers often side-lined in (leadership) scholarship, through 60,000 words across 26 break-neck, fist-stomping chapters and 38 colour original images and maps, and is available in both physical or digital formats. Instead of a trait or talent centred around individuals, hierarchy, organisations, positions, genes or luck, this book admonishes white-supremacist-cis-het-neuro-normative-capitalist-patriarchal forms of power and knowledge. Punchy, punching up and pulling no punches, and riffing on how ‘leadership’ originally refers to travelling, endurance and guidance, Neuro-Futurism is a call to arms, feet, sole-soul, to co-create tables/houses/worlds that profit (neuro-)divergent People, Planet, Poetry and Play. The deadline is 2050, so we’re running out of time. Are you ready for an extra-ordinary adventure?