Have a say in The Mosaic Rooms exterior makeover!

💄 Here’s what we’re proposing as part of our renovations, and we want your thoughts and suggestions:

• A new main entrance leading through our beautiful garden—complete with a lift, wider doors, and improved stairs for everyone to enjoy easier access. The gate from Earls Court Road will be changed for an easy pedestrian, cycle and wheelchair access. Newly designed boards with information about opening hours and the programme will be displayed on either side. Newly installed lettering above the new entrance will increase visibility from Earls Court Road.

• Garden glow-up! Think cosy new seating areas, a calming water feature, and parking for your bikes and buggies. We are changing the paving in the back garden to include a rain garden which is a type of Sustainable Urban Drainage. It will increase biodiversity of the rear area, and new plants and trees will contribute to reduce carbon emissions and improve air quality. Plus, for the little and big ones, we’re adding a slide and fun games to make your visits even more joyful. 😊

• The gallery spaces will be upgraded, including a new permanent learning space and we will also be expanding the bookshop. Let us know what you would like to see in our spaces!

What do you think? Tell us within the next two weeks before we submit our planning application (by 18 October 2024). Your input matters as we shape the future of The Mosaic Rooms!

Come around for a free cup of tea or coffee and look over the plans. ❤️ Let’s make this space a true reflection of what our community wants.

You can fill out this quick survey here. You can let us know your thoughts in the space, write a letter, email us contact@mosaicrooms.org or call us: 020 7370 9990.

Enjoy a moment of rest amidst the anti-radiation garden.🌹Proposing and exploring other temporalities, reflecting on the impact of nuclear and colonial violence, as well as the cycles of plant time, and healing, the garden will be open to visit throughout summer until entering the dormant season.🌾

Artist Himali Singh Soin created this therapeutic garden, proposing mending through growing plants with decontamination abilities, entangled with several such gardens planted around the world. It is part of Soin’s series Static Range (2020 – ongoing), Himali’s multi-disciplinary and multi-limbed project using a real-life spy-story in the Indian Himalayas as a canvas for speculations and reflections about nuclear culture, porosity, leakages, toxicity and love, spiritual-scientific entanglements, environmental catastrophe and post-nation states.

Himali Singh Soin is a writer and artist based between London and Delhi. She uses metaphors from outer space and the natural environment to construct imaginary cosmologies of interferences and entanglements. In doing this, she thinks through ecological loss and the loss of home, seeking shelter somewhere in the radicality of love. She has shown at Serpentine, Whitechapel and Mimosa House, London; TBA21, Madrid; Khoj, Delhi; Venice Biennale and Dhaka Art Summit among others. Her recent solo at The Art Institute of Chicago was an exploration of transnational nuclear culture. Her current research with her collective Hylozoic/Desires focuses on the metaphysics of salt, which began at DesertX in California last year and will continue in 2025 at Tate Britain and Somerset House in London.

Special thanks to Randa Toko, and Chris from Spitalfields City Farm.

Image: An Anti-Radiation Garden by Himali Singh Soin, The Mosaic Rooms, 2024. Photo by Ganesha Lockhart.

The public programme running in tandem with Performing Colonial Toxicity by Samia Henni offers multiple entry points to further engage with the concerns and research in the exhibition. The programme embraces Henni’s methodologies, engaging in alternative approaches to archival investigations to interrogate colonial histories and untold stories.

Events in the programme invite critical discussions around colonial and nuclear toxicity, stemming from recent academic and artistic work situated in the Global South. The programme opens with a focus on the Sahara, with Samia Henni, leading a walk through the exhibition to discuss the impact of French colonial violence in Algeria and more widely her work in disseminating her research in an exhibition format. In response, Zain Al Saie, curates an online talk with Jill Jarvis foregrounding research on the role of art and literature as a witness to trauma endured by Algerians during and after French colonisation. A panel bringing back Samia Henni, alongside experts such as David Burns, Alisher Khassenaliyev andMaïa Tellit Hawad, examines the wider field and entanglement of nuclear toxicity, making comparative connections with similarly impacted people and geographies, including the Sahara. 

A new film programme, Ciné-Sahra contributes to a nuanced understanding of colonial violence in the Sahara and the resistance rooted in this environment. Watch the UK premiere of Memories of an Unborn Sun (2024) by artist Marcel Mrejen, in dialogue with And still, it remains (2021) by Arwa Aburawa and Turab Shah, and Galb’Echaouf (2021) by Abdessamad El Montassir, followed by a conversation with the filmmakers. A partnership with Nottingham Contemporary in their programme accompanying Hamid Zénati’s retrospective exhibition, will present a second screening of And still, it remains, followed by a somatic event with Assia Ghendir. 

Further ecologically rooted, embodied research and readings manifest in the programme through a performative event in three acts with Alaa Abu Asad, and a reflective walk with Tawfik Naas and Emily Sarsam, in collaboration with San Mei Gallery. Alaa Abu Asad will share his research The dog chased its tail to bite it off (2018– ongoing) on invasive species, tracing the history of the Japanese knotweed plant, through colonial history, and social, economic and political effects. Artists Tawfik Naas and Emily Sarsam lead a guided exploration of lens shifting, inspired by Naas’ exhibition ‘Chaos Is A Flower’ in Myatt’s Fields Park offering perspectives to reimagine the past and the future. 

Artist Himali Singh Soin will create a therapeutic garden, proposing mending through growing plants with decontamination abilities, entangled with a several such gardens planted around the world. The programme closes with the premiere of An Affirmation (2022), the final video of Soin’s series Static Range, set around the UK’s decommissioned nuclear plant, Sellafield. An extension of the film’s healing ritual will take place in the garden, led by the artist in collaboration with Viveka Chauhan.

CALENDAR OF EVENTS

The Mosaic Rooms join the global strike for Palestine on Friday, 20 October. Together with artists and other organisations, we will be closed and use this time to learn and reflect together in order to work for a better future for everyone. We encourage you to join in solidarity.

We have made STUART Paper Issue 2: The Openness of the horizon to which I am not open access and downloadable. The issue is a live archive of artists’ thoughts and visual notes on the subject of solidarity with Palestine. We encourage you to download and share it, so as to amplify the voices that are coming from Palestine during this critical moment in its people’s struggle for justice and peace. We have also linked here reading resources collated by our community of friends, artists and academics.

Donate to Medical Aid for Palestine’s emergency appeal for Gaza

 

STUART Paper Issue 2: The Openness of the horizon to which I am not features contributions by: Al Wahat Collective (Areej Ashhab, Gabriella Demczuk, Ailo Ribas), Dina Mimi, Disarming Design, Elias Wakeem, Fana’ Collective, Karmel Sabri, Hajra Waheed, Islam Shabana, Ismail Nashef, Jumana Emil Abboud, KURS (Miloš Miletić and Mirjana Radovanović), Mohammad Sabaneh, Mo’min Swaitat / Majazz, Mothanna Hussein, Nika Autor, Qusai al Saify, Radio AlHara, RESOLVE Collective, Rouzbeh Shadpey, Shayma Nader, Tai Shani, The School of Mutants (Hamedine Kane and Stéphane Verlet-Bottéro), and Xaytun Ennasr.

STUART is an art publishing practice and collective producing printed matter and publications, designed by Rose Nordin. Initiated by Rose Nordin with Sepake Angiama, Priya Jay and Amrita Dhallu at iniva — the project centres the process of ‘live archiving’, conversation as marginalia and the book as a site of collaboration. The approach to publishing takes modes of thinking from the legacy of Stuart Hall. Previous issues include issue 0 (2021) and issue 1 Drift (2023), edited by Tavian Hunter and Sepake Angiama.

What is a party without the people? How can we activate a moment of solidarity, so that it belongs to many and not to few? How can we use listening to tune in to the possibilities that sonic solidarity offers?

Join us for a public programme curated by students from MACC collective highlighting sonic practices as tools for nurturing solidarities. Reverberating ideas through the form of a party, this programme invites us to gather together to enjoy the experiential. Through traces of mutual and continuously evolving exchanges, solidarities are composed and defined by you and your fellow party goers.

Inspired by fugitive radio, the sounds of protesting, and partying, the two-day programme will consist of participatory performance, DJ sets, conversation, a bespoke listening lounge with Syrian Cassette Archives and a site-specific voice note project. These practices and gestures are designed to activate moments of solidarity and explore its potential to be transmitted through sound waves. This live event will be archived as a tool for future use.

On Saturday, Solidarity FX party commences. The line-up opens with a set by Mo’min Swaitat, Palestinian Bedouin actor, filmmaker, music producer, DJ and archivist from Jenin, followed by LUMA, a British-Iraqi DJ and radio host, whose Arabic heritage and urban London roots influence her rhythmic percussion. DJ Tabideee, a British-Sudanese DJ and founder/creative director of Space Black will play a set celebrating techno music. The bar will be hosted by British-Jamaican mixologist Amelia, founder of Fill My Cup. The night aims to nurture community, inclusivity and fun.

On Sunday, Solidarity Re:verb echoes the traces of the night before through an open conversation and a participatory performance by Bint Mbareh. By exploring the question ‘How can we listen to the possibilities that sonic solidarity offers?’ participants are invited to interrogate how they listen to themselves and others in order to expand their understanding and capacity for solidarity.

This programme is curated in participation with The Mosaic Rooms by MACC collective, a collective formed of seven students from Chelsea College of Arts’ MA Curating and Collections course – Sara Abahsain, Elspeth Bland-Dear, Faisal Ghloum, Beata Li, Junnan Li, Qingrui Lin, Zhipeng Wen. Bringing a diverse range of cultural and educational backgrounds, the collective works to playfully ask questions, to learn through practice, and to enable participation.

The group exhibition Constellations of Multiple Wishes contemplates entangled recent histories, from the foundations of the Non-Aligned Movement. Co-curated with Bojana Piškur, the exhibition brings together archival materials, existing and newly commissioned works that connect peripheral geographies, agitating relationships between time and memory.

Curators Bojana Piškur and Angelina Radakovic are discussing the current exhibition Constellations of Multiple Wishes at the gallery. Learn about the curatorial thinking behind the show.

Visible from the street, at The Mosaic Rooms until 4 June.

Our Flag for Solidarity was co-created with artist collective KURS (Miloš Miletic and Mirjana Radovanovic) and workshop participants Aya, Julia, Hamja, Laiba and Yazhi, as part of the programme for the exhibition Constellations of Multiple Wishes.

‘may you walk ever
loved and in love’

is inspired by and a homage to Suheir Hammad‘s poem Talisman which we discussed together in the workshop. The folded triangle points to the popular shape of talismans, and represents the line ‘fold this prayer around your neck’ from the poem. The small arched triangles refer to the sun above a moon, a guiding principle of the poem.

Miloš Miletic and Mirjana Radovanovic jointly practice visual art and research as KURS. In their work they explore how artistic practice can contribute to (and become an integral part of) various social struggles. They often use archival material as a starting point, combined with revolutionary poetry/prose and the visual language of progressive movements from the past.

Independent researcher and curator Adam HajYahia has been specially invited by Bilna’es to co-curate the public programme running in tandem with the exhibition In the shade of the sun. He writes:

The public programming for In the shade of the sun builds on what Bilna’es’ exhibition conception already proposes. Methodologically, we need to radically rethink the formulations within which cultural and artistic work is produced, circulated, and consumed. For the burdensome demands of the art market and industry, the invisibilised labour of artists and cultural workers, as well as hierarchies and mediation configurations as we know them, are not conducive to thriving and sustainable futures. Aesthetically, and therefore politically, there is a need to continue the search for a new language to tackle the particularities of our present fascist neoliberal predicaments while also devising alternative assemblages, economies, and relations for an otherwise.

Bilna’es is the Arabic word for ‘in the negative’. The term evokes a politics of being and producing from within the moment of catastrophe, forging from beyond it, the multitude of possibilities across the impossible. This public programme borrows from this methodology to consider the potentialities that could materialise in the cracks of the crises of the present.

Poetry belongs to none is an evening of short films celebrating the newly commissioned video works by Dina Mimi and Mona Benyamin. The films are positioned in conversation with films by artists Onyeka Igwe, and the New Red Order. By viewing these works side by side, and sometimes dialectically, the program seeks to examine the various political strategies and aesthetic mechanisms contemporary artists have been using to subvert colonial power structures from within.

In a performance entitled BASICTENSION, SERAFINE1369 (Jamila Johnson-Small) moves through dance, text, and music, as an invitation to study how the conditions of our time permeate across and within our bodies, and how out of that conditioning one can navigate being in the world.

Moving onto a more discursive format, A Choreography of Infiltration, is a panel discussion with Akil Scafe-Smith (RESOLVE Collective), Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme (Bilna’es), Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung (Decolonial Hacker), and Zoé Samudzi about institutional censorship. Taking Germany, the UK, and the US as study cases, the conversation will lay out how large contemporary art institutions have been reproducing state politics of silencing, erasure, and illiberalism when it comes to anti-colonial Palestine organising, black radical traditions, and proletarian struggles, and propose thinking lines through which we can strategise as cultural workers in navigating these violent patterns.

If you’re reading this, it’s not too late is a panel discussion with Bahar Noorizadeh (Weird Economies), Marc Roig Blesa and Rogier Delfos (Werker Collective), and Joud Al-Tamimi (Asphalt Coop). They panelist will speak about their respective publishing practices and share what organising for and around textual outputs within a contemporary art framework enables them to effectuate. Through each unique publishing model, the conversation will examine how contemporary art infrastructures have been used to produce negative speculation, open collectivities, and revolutionary pedagogies.

The programme and exhibition will conclude with a special music performance to be announced soon.

Adam HajYahia is an independent writer, curator, and culture producer from Palestine. Adam’s current work and research focus on images and performativity in the revolutionary context of Palestine and the region, psychoanalysis and capitalism, as well as negative speculation and Marxist economics within contemporary art.

Bilna’es (meaning ‘in the negative’) is an adisciplinary platform that seeks to find new models for artists to redistribute resources and support one another in the production and circulation of work. Functioning as an adisciplinary publishing space with releases ranging from music to video games, web projects, publications, performances, installations, and other yet-to-be-developed forms. Bilna’es was initiated by Ruanne Abou-Rahme & Basel Abbas, Muqata’a, and other anonymous figures as a way to support artistic communities in Palestine and beyond.

Joining up with the programme for Tools for Solidarity, we launch STUART issue 2: The openness of the horizon to that which I am not – a visual pull-out poster newspaper designed by Rose Nordin of STUART, bringing together poetic reflections, excerpts of works and notes from artists Al Wahat Collective (Areej Ashhab, Gabriella Demczuk, Ailo Ribas), Dina Mimi, Disarming Design, Elias Wakeem, Fana’ Collective, Karmel Sabri, Hajra Waheed, Islam Shabana, Ismail Nashef, Jumana Emil Abboud, KURS (Miloš Miletić and Mirjana Radovanović), Mohammad Sabaneh, Mo’min Swaitat / Majazz, Mothanna Hussein, Nika Autor, Qusai al Saify, Radio AlHara, RESOLVE Collective, Rouzbeh Shadpey, Shayma Nader, Tai Shani, The School of Mutants (Hamedine Kane and Stéphane Verlet-Bottéro), and Xaytun Ennasr.

Other events include the performance and conversation Solidarity Re:Verb with artist and sound researcher Bint Mbareh, curated as part of a programme by MACC Collective highlighting sonic practices as tools for nurturing solidarities. Another highlight is The Mosaic Rooms Young Collective will organise their first public event for 2023.  In a year-long collaboration with Open School East, artist Sarah Al Sarraj will conceive a special event.

Our Bookshop Programme includes an offsite collaboration for the indie publisher and label fair as part of Another Sky‘s festival programme, as well as the UK launch event of My Port of Beirut, followed by a conversation with author and artist Lamia Ziadé.

The annual Edward W Said Lecture is delivered by Francesca Albanese, alongside respondent Nadia Abu El-Haj. The lecture explores Said’s profound legacy by delving into Israel’s settler colonial rule in the occupied Palestinian territory. Through a rigorous examination of international law within the context of global empire, Albanese confronts Israel’s colonial injustice and charts a course of action for legal and humanist resistance. Embracing Said’s work within the legal discipline entails upholding the principles of human rights and dignity, challenging oppressive systems and advocating for justice.

Sign up to our newsletter for all updates and check our overall 2023 programme here 

CALENDAR OF PROGRAMME OF EVENTS

The programme unfolding in tandem with the project and outdoor play commission Tools for Solidarity by RESOLVE COLLECTIVE explores what tools are needed in our communities to practice solidarity. Throughout summer and autumn, a series of events and monthly lesson plans will propose and share elements of creative thinking and making, and collaborative play to question, define, gather and support practices of solidarity. 

With a focus on radical play, we have invited several artists whose work focusses on co-creation and world-building to conceive lesson plans. These lessons plans manifest as a zine and are designed to guide creative activities in The Mosaic Rooms’ garden and beyond. Each one centres children’s creative language and is introduced with a public workshop but serves as its own resource. 

As part of the programme STUART papers will also launch STUART Issue 3: Centring Solidarity, this issue of the visual pull-out poster newspaper gathers a collection of solidarity notes with Palestine. 

Tools for Solidarity opened with a launch party with creative activities from RESOLVE Collective, a visual music score workshop with artist Nia Fekri, and music and sounds from Sudan by Basma. 

Lesson Plans form the main pillar of the programme and act as a device to share participatory artistic practice. Conceived in a workshop for families, Mohammad Saleh introduces the first lesson plan with Yalla Seeding. Yalla Seeding proposes the practice of seed bombing as an act of care, and a soft method to heal and green the land with clay, compost and seeds. In the second lesson plan, British-Iranian artist Nia Fekri shares how to compose and visualise sounds with You Draw My Hum, which explores the world of sounds. Further lesson plans are currently being developed by Rose Nordin and Space Black.  

Gatherings form another supportive pillar of this season. Students from MACC Collective curate a two-fold programme highlighting sonic practices as tools for nurturing solidarities. The collective reverberates these ideas through the form of a party, with Solidarity FX featuring a listening lounge with Syrian Cassette Archives, a site-specific voice note project, and DJ sets by Mo’min Swaitat, LUMA and Tabideee. The party is followed by Solidarity Re:Verb, a participatory performance on listening with Bint Mbareh. The School of Mutants assemble a gathering reflecting on the notion of Translation as Hospitality. The assembly is conceived around the Afrihili, a new language based on African languages developed in the 1970s by K. A. Kumi Attobrah with the intention for it to be used as a lingua franca on the continent. 

A series of events celebrates literature, culminating in Small Press Fest, with readings for children by Liblib, poetry and music with From the Lips to the Moon created by Pouya Ehsan and Tara Fatehi, featuring performances by Jabbaristan, Silai and Maureen Onwunali, a writing workshop on Solidarity and Literature facilitated by Azad Ashim Sharma, Luke Williams, Rogelio Braga, Sarona Bedwan and Hadeel Himmo, a book launch of Moving Pictures Painted with Patrick Fry, Haytham Nawar and Aflam. The fair includes a pop-up bookshop by Maqam Books, and tables by CentreCentre, Hamja Ahsan, Khidr Collective, LibLib Publishing, STUART. Fereshte Moosavi presents In Creating Objects: Farhad Ahrarnia & Hossein Valamanesh, followed by a conversation with Vlad Morariu on how handcrafts have been at the heart of the creative domain in societies. One of Sudan’s most important contemporary voices, Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi launches his new bilingual poetry book, A Friend’s Kitchen. Readings together with fellow poets and translators Bryar Bajalan and Shook delve into midnight musings in the aftermath of Al-Raddi’s forced exile from Khartoum to London. 

Sign up to our newsletter for all updates and check our overall 2023 programme here 

CALENDAR OF PROGRAMME OF EVENTS IN JULY