How We Hold: Rehearsals for Art and Social Change

Barby Asante is a London-based artist, curator and educator whose work explores space, place and identity. The drive of her work is to create spaces for dialogue, collective thinking, ritual, and re-enactment. 

Camille Barton is an interdisciplinary artist, educator and embodiment researcher, who uses afrofuturism to imagine creative interventions towards systems change. They are invested in breaking down the mind body separation that is dominant in Western paradigms in order to create more space for flexible thinking, holistic healing and bridging across differences. Camille’s art practice weaves dance, clowning, DJing, facilitation, film and cultural production. 

Ain Bailey is a composer, artist and DJ. She also facilitates workshops considering the role of sound in the formation of identity and conducts sound workshops with LGBTI+ refugees and asylum seekers. Past exhibitions include The Range at Eastside Projects, Birmingham; RE:Respite at Transmission Gallery, Glasgow, and a solo show at Cubitt Gallery, London, called And We’ll Always Be A Disco In The Glow Of Love (2019). In 2020 Bailey and Ego Ahaiwe Sowinski were commissioned by Studio Voltaire, London, as part of their Desperate Living programme, for which they created both a composition and print entitled “Remember To Exhale”. Last year, Bailey was commissioned by Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge, to create the exhibition “Version” and composed “Atlantic Railton” which was part of the Listening To The City sound installation programme in architect Sumayya Vally’s 2021 Serpentine Pavilion. 2022 sees Bailey commissioned for the Black Melancholia group exhibition at CCS Bard, New York, US and Bruckenmusik in Cologne, Germany. 

Zahra Bei is a PhD candidate at UCL Institute of Education in the department of Education, Practice and Society. Zahra is researching race/racism in education, school exclusion, dis/ability and the school-to-prison pipeline using Critical Race Theory, Black Feminist thought, Whiteness and Abolition as both an analytical lens and an organising praxis. Zahra is a recovering teacher and middle leader with 20 years in the classroom, both in mainstream secondary education and PRU/alternative provisions in London. Zahra is one of the co-founders of the Coalition of Anti-racist Educators (CARE) and of No More Exclusions (NME). Zahra’s anti-racist praxis is intersectional and rooted in internationalism, feminism and anti-capitalism. 

Adelita Husni Bey is an artist and educator interested in anarcho-collectivism, theatre, law, and urban studies. Committed to social practice that can exist both within and outside the museum, while addressing the material conditions of work-making, she organises gatherings and produces workshops and exhibitions using non-competitive pedagogical models through the framework of contemporary art. Husni Bey regularly engages with museums, institutional education departments and universities as sites of production. However, the artist’s commitment to social practice outside the museum has also led to work with hospitals, high schools, squats, after-school writing programs, pro bono immigration organisations, activists and theatre companies. A commitment to reevaluating the material conditions of work-making drives Husni Bey’s practice of establishing collaborators as part-owners of editions of the collectively produced work. She is a 2012 Whitney Independent Study Program fellow, a 2020–2022 Vera List Center fellow and has represented Italy at the Venice Biennale of Art, 2017. 

Rae Johnson, PhD, RSW, RSMT, BCC is a scholar, activist, social worker, and somatic movement therapist working at the intersection of embodiment and social justice. Rae is the author of Embodied Social Justice and the forthcoming Embodied Activism. 

Farzana Khan (she/her) is Healing Justice London’s co-founder and Executive Co-Director. Her practice works on building community health, repair and self-transformation rooted in disability justice, survivor work and trauma-in-formed practice working with communities of colour and other marginalised and underrepresented groups. Farzana has over 10 years of background in Youth and Community work, particularly focused on arts-based education projects both in the UK and internationally. Farzana is the former creative and strategic director at Voices that Shake, bringing together young people, artists and campaigners to develop creative responses to social injustice. She ran this working at Platform London, a climate and social justice organisation working across arts, education, research and activism.

Farzana is a trustee of the International Curatorial Forum and Stuart Hall Foundation. She also sits on the advisory board of Kids of Colour.

Harold Offeh is an artist working in a range of media including performance, video, photography, learning and social arts practice. Offeh is interested in the space created by the inhabiting or embodying of histories. He employs humour to confront the viewer with historical narratives and contemporary culture. He has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally including at Tate Britain, Tate Modern and South London Gallery in London; Studio Museum Harlem, New York; MAC VAL, France, and Art Tower Mito, Japan.  

Meenadchi teaches Non-Violent Communication with a decolonial and transformative justice lens (DNVC) and is a family constellation facilitator. They were introduced to Non-Violent Communication in 2002, finding it to be a profoundly transformative tool for changing how they speak to themselves and others. Their practice has been shaped over time by their work with survivors of state violence, gender-based violence, complex trauma and serious mental illness. Meenadchi believes that our lives are not an accident. If we are here together, then it must be so that we can find each other—and that collectively, we will find our way through.

Jasleen Kaur (b.1986, Glasgow, Scotland) is an artist based in London. Her work is an ongoing exploration into the malleability of culture and the layering of social histories within the material and immaterial things that surround us. Her practice examines diasporic identity and hierarchies of history, both colonial and personal. She works with sculpture, video and writing. Recent and upcoming commissions include Wellcome Collection, UP Projects, Glasgow Women’s Library, Market Gallery, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Eastside Projects and Hollybush Gardens. Her work is part of the permanent collection of Touchstones Rochdale, Royal College of Art and Crafts Council.

Kadeem Marshall-Oxley is a radical poet and grassroots community organiser with No More Exclusions (NME), whose mission is to remove the headteacher’s right to exclude young people altogether and to abolish school exclusion in all its forms. This is part of attempting to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline and create an inclusive education system that works for all, especially those who are alienated and marginalised. Marshall-Oxley’s call to activism was an organic response to experiences of dealing with racism in a UK context, having being targeted since his first engagement with the education system.