Saturday 5 October 2024, 7pm
Welcome back to MUSHAIRA 5.0, a night of poetry, performance and music curated by the87press. In October we will be celebrating the launch of WILDPLASSEN, the debut poetry collection by artist dove / Chris Kirubi and the UK edition of The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker 1974-1989.
The event will include a reading by dove / Chris Kirubi, along with a group reading of the collected letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker by Abeera Khan, Lola Olufemi, Sarona Abuaker, and Janey Starling. We will also be joined by Irenosen Okojie and Elena Dudum.
This event also marks the first in a new Saturday MUSHAIRA format with slightly earlier start and finish times. We also have The Syrian Sunflower doing a pop-up kitchen at the event with healthy Levantine cuisine available to purchase, full of vegetarian, vegan, and gluten free options at affordable prices.
Lola Olufemi is a black feminist writer and Stuart Hall foundation researcher from London based in the Centre for Research and Education in Art and Media at the University of Westminster. Her work focuses on the uses of the political imagination and its relationship to cultural production, political demands and futurity. She is author of Feminism Interrupted: Disrupting Power (Pluto Press, 2020), Experiments in Imagining Otherwise (Hajar Press, 2021) and a member of 'bare minimum', an interdisciplinary anti-work arts collective.
Abeera Khan is Lecturer in Gender and Sexuality at the SOAS Centre for Gender Studies. She has published on the interrelatedness between empire, gender, race and sexuality in The Contrapuntal, Feminist Review, Feminist Formations, lambda Nordica and Religion and Gender. She is co-editor of 'Abolitions: Writing Against Abandonment', a 40th anniversary special issue of Wasafiri Magazine.
Janey Starling is a feminist writer, media strategist and co-director of gender justice campaign organisation Level Up. Janey’s political background is in feminist direct action, queer DIY punk and trade union organising. She currently spearheads a national campaign to end the imprisonment of pregnant women, which has resulted in several women’s prison sentences being overturned and the introduction of a new sentencing framework.
Sarona Abuaker is a poet, artist, and educational outreach worker. Her poems have been published in Berfrois, MAP Magazine, and the87press’ theHythe Digital Poetics series. Her mixed-media essay Suture Fragmentations – A Note on Return was published in December 2020 with KOHL: A Journal for Body and Gender Research. She is based in London. Why so few women on the street at night is her debut collection (the87press, 2021).
Irenosen Okojie is a Nigerian British author whose work pushes the boundaries of form, language and ideas. Her novel, Butterfly Fish, and short story collections, Speak Gigantular and Nudibranch, have won and been nominated for multiple awards. Her journalism has been featured in The New York Times, the Observer, the Guardian and the Huffington Post. She is a Contributing Editor for The White Review as well as And Other Stories. She co-presented the BBC's Turn Up for The Books podcast, alongside Simon Savidge and Bastille frontman Dan Smith. Her work has been optioned for the screen. She has also judged various literary prizes including the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Gordon Burn Prize and the BBC National Short Story Award. She was a judge for the 2023 Women's Prize for Fiction. Vice Chair of the Royal Society of Literature, she was awarded an MBE For Services to Literature in 2021. She is the director and founder of Black to the Future festival. Her new novel Curandera is published by Dialogue Books.
dove / Chris Kirubi is a poet-artist based in London. Recent projects and performances include The Archive is a Gathering Place at Tate Britain in collaboration with Rhoda Boateng, The Blue House co-founded with Daniel Baker-Wells, and a collaborative improvisation at Décalé with (petals) Petero Kalulé. Recent commissioned texts include Fabulous Musics published in response to Shenece Oretha's UAL 20/20 commission with Hepworth Wakefield and a note on audrey mbugua's dog published in the Jerwood Survey III catalogue in response to Ebun Sodipo's work. They are a lecturer at Slade School of Fine Art.
Elena Dudum is a Palestinian-Syrian writer whose work explores the boundaries of generational trauma and what it means to have an identity shaped by political narratives and agendas. As a grandchild of Palestinian refugees, her writing untangles the notion of a “homeland” and how she can connect to this amorphous place — two generations removed. Most recently, Elena graduated from Columbia University with an MFA in Nonfiction Writing where she also taught freshman composition. Her work has been published in The Atlantic, TIME Magazine, Bon Appétit, Cosmopolitan Magazine, and other outlets.
Forever a humble student of the dancefloor, Jimmy Two Shoes is inspired by music and its capacity for creating those magical moments. As a Subtle Radio resident and multi-genre label boss of Sub Merchants, Jwarn seamlessly navigates an array of bass-infused flavors, delivering the flows to wriggle your toes to.
Dr Aditi is a thinker and creator, writer and dreamer.
Having worked at the intersections of law, culture and politics in various capacities, Aditi is motivated by a politics of refusal, living in rupture as rapture; turning away from hegemonic worlds of oppression and tuning into something different, beyond the world we live in and moving to the rhythms of an elsewhere. It is this compulsion which guides her pedagogy in the education work she does. Riffing off education for liberation, she creates spaces of (un)learning as a site of radical praxis, using tools of music, film and visual culture, to unpack the ways in which ideologies of oppression and liberation travel through cultural production. She teaches her own course, Rhythm, Race, Revolution as well as courses at different London-based academic institutions.
With a particular interest in creativity as decolonial praxis, she situates the imagination as a radical site of refusal and resistance. Her research work examines the different ways in which Black and Brown cultural production has activated autonomous modes of meaning-making and self-determination in London, through contesting racialised norms and (re)imagining racialised postcolonial subjectivities. And it is through an ethic of jazz that Aditi curates this work.
