Alserkal Arts Foundation
Diaspora tugs at us, through its fragmented inheritances of memory, misrecognition, guilt, joy, and affinity. Objects have porous meanings. Across waters, they circulate, drift, resurface. They are portals into examining subjectivities, what we carry and what is carried through us, across our generational scatterings.
Led by poet and researcher Momtaza Mehri, this writing workshop traces what diaspora means to us as a space of both collectivity and tension. Mehri invites us to write around, and through, objects that represent the inward facing, closely-held relationship we have to our diaspora. Each participant will be invited to bring with them an object that speaks to their time in the Gulf as a site of centuries-deep diasporic encounters and frissons.
Date: Saturday, 11 May 2024
Time: 11AM-1PM
Location: WH51, Common Room, Alserkal Arts Foundation
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About Momtaza Mehri
Momtaza Mehri is a poet and researcher working across criticism, education, and radio. She is a former Young People’s Poet Laureate for London and Frontier-Antioch Fellow at Antioch University (Los Angeles). She has completed residencies at St. Paul’s Cathedral and the British Library, and is now the new Poet-in-Residence at Homerton College, University of Cambridge. She is a columnist for Tate Etc, the arts magazine published by the Tate network of galleries. Her debut poetry collection Bad Diaspora Poems recently won the 2023 Forward Prize for Best First Collection, as well as an Eric Gregory Prize. She is obsessed with slippage and spillage, and her recent work is concerned with South-South resonances and affinities.
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Image: Shellie Zhang Ode to Spring from A day passes like a year (2021-2022)