Shifting the Centre: Reading Group

The Stuart Hall Foundation and the International Curators Forum are collaborating to host a reading group as part of ICF’s Shifting the Centre project, in response to requests that the ICF hold more reading groups following those convened around exhibitions with Black Cultural Archives and iniva in 2023. The first reading group of this collaboration will take place on Tuesday 26 March 2024, 6pm – 7.30pm, at Healing Justice London’s Dream Space.

The Reading Group

We invite attendees to bring in a single text, poem, quote, artwork, or excerpt which you associate with the notion of ‘anticolonialism’ to share and discuss during the open and informal group discussions. If you prefer not to bring your own text, this link to a Miro board houses all of the texts explored through the project so far.

This session opens up a space through which we can generate collective consideration of the ways in which critical texts can act as important analytical tools for addressing urgent political realities, such as the colonial systems impacting peoples living in places like Palestine and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, through historical readings of revolutions like the ones that took place in Haiti and Grenada.

There will be food available during the event after 6.30pm.

This is an in-person event with limited spaces and registration is essential. Register via the booking link.

There is scope to make this a monthly event – if you are interested in signing up to attend a Shifting the Centre reading group regularly, with ICF and SHF, please email info@internationalcuratorsforum.org

About Shifting the Centre

Shifting the Centre is the International Curators Forum’s archival activation project dedicated to excavating the radical observations, emancipatory dreams and revolutionary practices of anti-colonial thinkers to develop counter-approaches by asking: what kinds of ideas emerge when those resisting dominant forces are the protagonists of world history?

The project locates connections between seemingly unrelated events, people, issues and objects as a way of rejecting a single vantage point from which to understand, tell and mobilise histories. Ultimately, it seeks to widen what dominant forces attempt to narrow: our vision, imagination, and the political possibilities available to us.

Shifting the Centre forms part of ICF’s Systems Reclaimed project, which aims to create a platform for creative practitioners to highlight and interrogate specific manifestations of systemic inequality both within and beyond the arts.

Image: Shifting the Centre: Anticolonial Ways of Seeing installation view (2023), courtesy ICF and iniva, by Jemima Yong.