Thursday 30 August 6 – 8.30pm, FREE – book via Eventbrite

Join Beverly Naidus and Joan Haran at the opening event for We Almost Didn’t Make it, an interactive installation made by Beverly with support from the Seattle-based ARTifACTs collective.

Joan and Beverly will give talks exploring the question: ‘What makes a socially engaged art practice resilient in this time?’

We Almost Didn’t Make it addresses the uncertainties faced by humanity as climate change and ongoing ecocide and environmental injustice affect many populations around the world. It explores ways to negotiate the barrage of daily assaults on our psyches by imagining the lives of our descendants and what we might do to improve their lives. A goal of the installation is to foster more dialogue about ways to move past “dystopic” thinking and support resilient activism.

The exhibition will be at ONCA from 29 August to 9 September as part of our Arts Council-supported summer programme Visionary Fictions.

This event will be BSL interpreted.

BSL access video for exhibition and events:

ABOUT BEVERLY NAIDUS

Beverly Naidus, interdisciplinary artist, writer and facilitator of an innovative studio arts curriculum, has been creating interactive installations, digital projects, artist books and narrative drawings for over three decades. Much of her work is audience-participatory, inviting people to tell their own stories in response to the theme being explored. Inspired by lived experience, topics in her art focus on environmental and social issues, including how we are individually and collectively affected by racism, climate change and multiple forms of systemic oppression.

She is the author of Arts for Change: Teaching Outside the Frame, numerous essays on socially engaged art and pedagogy and some recent pieces of speculative fiction. She has taught at several NYC museums, Carleton College, Cal State Long Beach, Hampshire College, Goddard College and the Institute for Social Ecology. She has guest lectured and led workshops all over North America and in Europe.

http://www.beverlynaidus.net/

www.edenreframed.blogspot.com

About Joan Haran

Joan is a Research Fellow at Cardiff University. From 2015 to 2017 she was based in the Center for the Study of Women in Society at the University of Oregon. She then returned to the University of Cardiff to take up the third and final year of her Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship in the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies.

Joan’s current research project is “Imaginactivism”. She is developing a series of empirical case studies tracing networks of fictional cultural production and social activism as a way to theorise and flesh out the concept of imaginactivism. The concept is an alternative lens to apply to the issue of critical and everyday utopias;  feminism, science / fiction, racial and environmental justice are key areas of focus. In her spare time, Joan continued to develop her manuscript Genomic Fictions and keep apprised of the public manifestations of genomics and postgenomics.