Rachel Jones Readings

Please join us for an evening of readings inspired by Rachel Jones’s exhibition SMIIILLLLEEEE. The exhibition is on view until 5 February. Five speakers drawn from a variety of disciplines, including poetry, research, publishing, curating and the visual arts, have been invited to respond to Jones’s work. Each contributor has devised a new piece of writing that will be performed to a live audience and surrounded by Jones’s paintings on the evening. The speakers will be introduced by the artist.

RSVP: rsvp.london@ropac.net

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Speakers: 

Sepake Angiama is artistic director of the Institute for International Visual Arts (Iniva) in London, where the Stuart Hall Library provides a rich resource for a globalised discourse on the practice of artists and curators from Indigenous, Latin American, African, Asian, Caribbean and Diaspora backgrounds. She co-curated the Chicago Architecture Biennial and initiated under the mango tree, a self-organised gathering of decolonising and unlearning practices. She completed her studies in Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art, where she received the Monique Beudert Award.

Margaret Busby CBE, Hon. FRSL (Nana Akua Ackon) was born in Ghana and educated in the UK, becoming Britain’s youngest and first Black woman publisher when she co-founded Allison & Busby in the late 1960s. A writer, editor, broadcaster, and literary critic, she has written drama for BBC radio and the stage, interviewed high-profile writers, judged the Booker Prize, and served on numerous boards.  A long-time campaigner for diversity in publishing, she compiled the pioneering Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Words and Writings by Women of African Descent (1992) and its 2019 follow-up, New Daughters of Africa.

Imani Mason Jordan (fka Robinson) is an interdisciplinary writer, artist, editor and facilitator. Their research-led practice combines live art and performance, oration, collaboration, poetry and critical theory, exploring themes of Black geographies, the afterlives of transatlantic slavery, abolition, radical resistance and the politics of safety. They are one half of the artistic and curatorial collaboration Languid Hands, who are the current Curatorial Fellows at Cubitt, Angel, until Spring 2022. 

Yates Norton is a curator at the Roberts Institute of Art.  He often works closely with friend and collaborator, David Ruebain, on disability justice work. His collaborations and work with artists include singing in Lina Lapelytė, Vaiva Grainytė and Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė’s Golden Lion-awarded opera, Sun and Sea. He studied at the University of Cambridge, Harvard University and the Courtauld Institute of Art.

Vanessa Onwuemezi is a writer and poet living in London. She is the winner of The White Review Short Story Prize 2019 and her work has appeared in literary and art magazines including Granta, frieze and Prototype. She has written several exhibition texts, most recently, Be Overcome,Kira Freije, Gianni Manhattan, Liste 2021 and SMIIILLLLEEEE, Rachel Jones, Thaddaeus Ropac, 2021. Her debut short story collection, Dark Neighbourhood, was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions, UK, in October 2021.