Tag: body and mind in motion amid place and world in (com)motion
One way to sum up what I do, why I do what I do, and how I do what I do, is the mobilisation /activation of the body and mind in motion and commotion as a form of creative and critical intervention and interrogation of and amid a place (often urban) or world in motion and commotion across boundaries/borders/silos (disciplinary/cultural/geopolitical/neuro-normativity and more). It is ill-disciplined, playful and artful, in productive antagonisms with other bodies and minds. Conjunctions and prepositions galore!
Join me on my forthcoming book tour in Helsinki, Singapore, London, Manchester and online.
My first monograph will be published by Springer Nature/Palgrave Macmillan in Spring 2024. My book introduces ‘Neurofuturism’ as a heuristic praxis for individuals, collectives and institutions to re-imagine a better future, by re-configuring neurodiversity as a mobile, creative leadership strategy.
In the final of the 2024 run of Material Interests, we welcomed award-winning filmmaker Nausheen Khan from India. This session was critical to learn more about ways to decolonise the curriculum and the role of arts and cultural leadership to catalyse change through counter-hegemonic strategies in the face of Islamophobia, threats to human rights and democracy, and misogyny not just in the Global South but beyond, and from the perspective of a courageous young feminist filmmaker.
I was juror for the prestigious Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival (YIDFF)’s New Asian Currents in Japan. There will also be a showcase for my films, during which I will show How to Thrive in 2050 (2021, commissioned for BBC Culture in Quarantine) and Chlorine Addiction (2000, which was at the NAC in 2001 too, as well as multiple international showcases including Transmediale 2001).
What could our future look like? Even — or especially — when the absurdity and extra-ordinariness of how things are makes this a preposterous question to raise, let alone respond to, it is imperative that we insist, persist, and resist, by making, re-making, re-imagining and re-inventing our truths, to re-write our own stories, histories and futures, to work through our pain, trauma and joys. Come ‘Have a Speed-Date With Kai – Let’s Re-Imagine our (Collective) Future Together’, at a group show Ordinary Things (02-25 November 2023), The Winchester Gallery, curated by Professor of Visual Politics Louise Siddons.
I enjoy playing with words and the written language as creative material. However, certain ‘standard’ approaches can present difficulty. Being dyslexic, academic writing and reading aren’t my mother tongue. I am thus delighted to have signed not one but three book contracts recently. The books are distinct in their tone, case studies and reach, but also, interrelated. They will reach the world from 2024.
I’ve migrated back down south — quiet south. I’m thrilled to share that since July 2023, I’ve become Associate Professor in Arts and Cultural Leadership at University of Southampton’s Winchester School of Art.
As Trustee Board Member of Hear Me Out (HMO), mobilities researcher, and failed former music child prodigy-wannabe (with audition aged 15 for a place at Royal College of Music), I am delighted to participate in a workshop as part of Music, Migration and Mobility at Royal College of Music with HMO Artistic Director on 27 January 2023.
As my essay (08.2022) observes, had Running Artfully Network artist Véronique Chance performed her Thames Run in Summer 2022 instead of Summer 2021, she would’ve only needed to run 232km instead of 240km, as the River Thames has since dried up 8km. Well done humans.
Pro-Perspirant Provocations premiered in July 2022 at Newcastle Contemporary Art, and was created at the invitation of architect and University of Newcastle Architecture PhD candidate Sarah Ackland to celebrate her new show Taking Space, an effort part of the Matrix Feminist Design Collective.
Why is normality the gold standard, when the “norm” hasn’t worked for a while? Isn’t it time for new models of leadership, and new role models? Isn’t it more exciting to be non-standard, to be covered in glitter, and to embrace a phenomenal spectrum of colours and possibilities?’ Read my interview on neurodiversity and creativity with Jane Clark at Beshara magazine.
My new, not very good article ‘The Artful Agile Atypical Octopussy’ is live in the peer-reviewed Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, On (Un)Knowns, 03 March 2022. This was one of 30 selected articles out of 160 proposals, and one of two that are in full colour.
What should art schools change, so that we can lead change and thrive in, with and for the next generation? Since you asked me, I’ll recommend growing tentacles. This is my new keynote for Network for higher arts education with >300,000 members in 282 institutions in Europe, N and S Americas, and AustralAsia.
3 interdisciplinary Fine Art degrees (London, Chicago, Tokyo) and other professional qualifications (classical music, leadership and coaching, art-science, psychiatry, mental health, technology and more)
>14 solo shows or major showcases (including Biennale of Sydney, Guangzhou Triennale); >100 invited shows (including with Yayoi Kusama at Sung Kok Art Museum in Korea and a performance at Pompidou), >150 showcases in film festivals (including MOMA New York, Transmediale Festival), three interventions in theatre (including a nomination for Vagina Monologues).
How To Thrive In 2050: 8 Tentacular Workouts For A Tantalising Future! is a new short film I made in Spring 2021. This is an art manifesto calling for a creative, equitable and ‘neuro-fantastic’ future by an Octopussy. The World Premiere is on BBC Culture in Quarantine Autumn 2021
Stimulating article by the marvellously-named artist-researcher Gudrun Filipska on the Running Artfully Network launch.
RAN reframes running as an artistic intervention to unpick our time of multiple global crises. At the 26 February Friday launch 10:00-17:00GMT, we presented 22 new insights into climate change, mental health, tech, inequality through running + art, poetry, theatre, sound and more by artists, poets, academics and more from UK and Europe.
I was commissioned by Fermynwoods Contemporary Arts to create a mask. I made 5 and you can buy my favourite one, Sight and Site of Dissent, here.
My human-beast chimera performs a novel, embodied interdisciplinary mode of knowledge exchange and creation.
This is a recording of a performance lecture I delivered on 6 August 2020 for University of Reading, a repeat of a keynote-lecture that premiered for Royal Society of Arts on 9 July 2020 which was attended by up to 130 people.
I am hyperactive by nature and design. This restlessness is existential, political, neurological, personal, professional.
‘Run Riot’ (2019) is a chapter in Handbook on Methods and Applications for Mobilities Research, Edward Elgar (2020). The structure of the text follows philosopher Jean-Jaques Rousseau’s 1778 Reveries of a Solitary Walker, and it activates a dyslexic approach to writing.
MOBILITIES RESEARCH: I was Visiting Fellow (2017-2018) at Centre for Mobilities Research (Cemore), Lancaster University. This draws on my associated with Cemore since circa 2012, when I first…
Watch commissioned Pecha Kucha Life on the RUN! RUN! RUN!, at My Life in Running, Pub Pannuhuone the ANTI Festival of Contemporary Art, Kuopio, Finland 2015 . In…
Panel discussion on RUN! RUN! RUN! Biennale and my solo work on Free Thinking.
Official Selection, Arts and Humanities Research Council Research in Film Award 2019 . Premiered at the South London Gallery on 5 June 2018. Toured at Southbank Centre, Science Museum and NTU Centre for Contemporary Art (Singapore) amongst others.
My work has been widely covered by mainstream printed media in UK, Tokyo, Singapore since 1992. Here are a few recent examples.
This was an exhibition of eight works published in the Winter 2016 edition of Transfers Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies.
2020 version of Exceptional Talent, the State of Fun & Islands of After Death, on movement as a human right, which was first performed as a keynote-lecture at Peter Scott at the Inaugural Art & Mobilities Symposium 2018.
Royal Society of the Arts blog post contextualising RUN! RUN! RUN! Biennale 2016, which responded to the (anti-)migrant crisis and referendum results.
The body and mind in motion and commotion as a form of intervention and interrogation of and amid a world in motion and commotion. A non-linear slideshow performed at ANTI Festival of Contemporary Performance (Kuopio, Finland 2015) and Exparte at the Brick Lane Gallery (for the Singapore Tourism Board, 2015).
This is a recording of a conversation I had with artist Melanie Manchot at Fermynwoods Contemporary Art, 4th August 2015. I also shared a performance-lecture called ‘Life On The RUN! RUN! RUN! in the form of a Prezi.
Trailer for a Sisyphian permanent commission in Singapore at the heart of the Arts and Heritage District, since 2010. 29-minute video cycle on the Circle Line with 29-chapters and 29 riddles that came on each evening 19:29, starring ‘Desyphus’ who swims perpetually in the looped line.
Run run run! Run into difference. Embrace flux. Don’t let things come to standstill. Don’t take things lying down. Mock/knock the toxic status quo. Let us surge forward, hand-in-hand.
An early proposal of the running-messenger as disruptor and connector. UCL Institute of Advanced Studies.