The body, “queer” or otherwise, is the subject of this programme of shorts. Exploring the possibilities of posthuman experimentation, we ask: what forms of existence can be envisaged through the imaginative potential of queerness? This programme of films will be followed by a creative workshop facilitated by poet and writer Jhani Randhawa. In this workshop, we will reflect on “contact meditations,” and will build meditations of our own through ekphrastic writing and somatic exercises. Considering frameworks of choreopoetics and Libera Pisano’s anarchic “sceptical gesture, we will engage in varying legibilities of (queer) embodiment in what dance-grammarians Pia Sazani and Sam Creely understand to be a “collaborative study of the political dimensions of expressive action.”
From 12.30 PM Sunday 28 July at Pelican House.
*Before you sign up for this event, please note: This is an embodiment-centred, all-bodies-embraced, event. Some of the somatic exercises will entail sustained physical contact with other individuals/attendees. We will discuss consent and set safe perimeters around shared touch before the group activities. You are welcome to opt out of these activities at any time, and alternative ways to engage with the event will be offered. We invite you to come dressed in clothes that you would feel comfortable moving about on the floor in, and people will be invited to take off their footwear upon entering the room.
Jhani Randhawa is a collaborator and multidisciplinary maker interested in anticolonial feminisms, fugue states, social change ecologies, and formations of friendship across species and consciousness. Co-founding editor of the experimental publishing project rivulet, Jhani’s debut collection Time Regime (Gaudy Boy, 2022) won the 2023 California Book Award for Poetry and was supported in part by a Yasmin Fellowship from Millay Arts. Their performative and literary work has been presented or is forthcoming in A Mouth Holds Many Things: A Hybrid Literature Anthology (de-Canon/Fonograf Editions, 2024), Gulf Coast Journal, 128 Lit, O BOD, The Poetry Project, ASAP/J, bæst journal, New Art Gallery Walsall (Walsall, UK), Czong Institute for Contemporary Art (Gyeonggi-do, South Korea), ONE Archives at USC (Los Angeles, CA), Thymele Arts Los Angeles (Los Angeles, CA), and Heimbold Visual Arts Center (Bronxville, NY), among others. Jhani’s somatic interests are concerned with transcestral bridging and grief-work, and have been nurtured through their yin yoga training, workshops with Upaya Zen Center, All Wash Away Sacred Harp Singers of Los Angeles, and hannah rubin, as well as through joyful experiments in public dance.
In collaboration with SOAS, University of London, 'Queer' Asia is renewing its film screening series for 2024, building upon the intellectual, emotional, and political energy of the 2022 'Queer' Asia Film Festival: Survival.
REVIVAL 2024 asks us to imagine the possibilities of queer liberation, kinship, acts of resistance, solidarity, and desire. How do queer individuals and communities negotiate and contest the nexus of oppressive structures, Eurocentric notions of queer freedom, and discourses of exclusion? What are the queer stories and futures that can be articulated through subversive and embodied practices across the normative borders of space and time? These stories invite us to think beyond the limits of our own social and political conditioning and engage in a shared space that will proffer transgressive potential and reflexive discussion.