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Join us for a night of poetry readings and experimental performances from Lola Olufemi, Maitha AlSuwaidi, Priya Jay and Silai Estatira, curated by Mawadah Nofal. We will come together and create space where we can lean on each other in these times of fragmentation. Through poetic reflection, we will engage with hope as a tool for solidarity to move towards a brighter horizon.

Lola Olufemi is a black feminist writer and researcher from London. She is co-author of ‘A FLY Girl’s Guide to University’ (Verve Poetry Press, 2019), author of ‘Feminism Interrupted: Disrupting Power’ (Pluto Press, 2020) and ‘Experiments in Imagining Otherwise’ (Hajar Press, 2021). She is a member of ‘bare minimum’, an interdisciplinary anti-work arts collective and the recipient of the 2020 Techne AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership between The Stuart Hall Foundation, CREAM and Westminster School of Arts. Her work focuses on the uses of the imagination in revolutionary cultural production; its relationship to futurity, political demands and ‘imaginative-revolutionary potential’. She will be reading excerpts from her book Experiments in Imagining Otherwise.

Maitha AlSuwaidi is an Ajami-Emirati artist, writer, and researcher. She performs in both experimental and traditional theatre spaces, has performed her poetry in spaces like the 2022 Smithsonian Folklife Festival. She holds a bachelor’s degree in political science from NYU Abu Dhabi and a master’s degree in public policy from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Maitha is currently completing a masters degree in Visual, Material, and Museum Anthropology at Oxford, aiming to combine her interdisciplinary and intersectional learnings in policymaking, politics, and digital scholarship into her art and research practice. Maitha will be reading one of her reverse-zines, as well as leading an activity on how to practice radical softness through the tender concealment of the reverse-zine process.

Priya Jay is looking for the places where language lives in service of liberation. Through word, sound and taste, Priya will invoke the love at the heart of grief.

Silai is wind and storm. she collects from all that is around her, piecing fragments as they emerge. her poetry is part trance, part rhythm and part gift from the collective unconscious. she is both artist and witness; both lettered and unlettered. This new work will see Silai in dialogue with Xaytun Ennasr’s Revolution is a forest the colonists cannot burn. Centred around land and sea and the ever giving natural world, Silai’s contribution will be a multi-sensory sonic venturing through poetry, music and image into the untamability of land; to that which is eternal and indigenous; and to the حقّ that land inevitably carries.