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In celebration of World Environment Day, we’re sharing past recordings of this season’s Ways of Knowing events, all in one place.
Ways of Knowing is a programme of art and ideas bringing us into dialogue with alternative ways of thinking about our relationship to the world. Through an emerging and inter-connected programme of live events and digital projects which centre otherwise peripheral knowledges, the series questions what we can know and how we can come to know it.
Through an artist-focused programme of talks, films, seminars, workshops, performances and online projects, Ways of Knowing dedicates its first season this summer to Water/Fluidity, at a moment when our connections to water and marine life are arguably at their most strained.
Plunge into the fluid imaginations of each event below and be sure to book your tickets for the next events in the series.
The acclaimed photographer and filmmaker Chloe Dewe Mathews launched her new photographic bookwork exploring the many and diverse rituals attached to the Thames, from source to mouth. For Thames Log, Chloe was joined in conversation with renowned multi-disciplinary artist and filmmaker Andrew Kötting, whose own films engage repeatedly with the waterways of the UK, from the river to the Channel and beyond.
Working at the intersection of feminism and environmental studies, Astrida Neimanis is the leading figure of ‘hydrofeminist’ thought. Her ideas on weathering, the non-human and ‘wet matter’ are explored in books including Bodies of Water (2017) and have had a profound impact on how we can think about water anew. Hydrofeminism emphasises a radical collectivity – if we are all bodies of water then we are connected to the watery planet through a fluid continuum.
In this lecture, Neimanis looked to artist Eileen Agar’s own practice of collage and various contemporary responses to the climate catastrophe.
Two striking new artists’ feature length essay films – Joshua Bonnetta‘s The Two Sights and Huw Wahl‘s The Republics – engage in multisensory ways with the waterlands of the Outer Hebrides. The latter also follows its protagonist, poet Stephen Watts, back to the banks of the Thames near his home in Shadwell. Here Wahl and Watts were joined in conversation about place, poetry, sound and storytelling alongside a screening of Walh’s work.
Informed by the traditional knowledges of her birthplace, the Autonomous Region of Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, Sydney-based artist Taloi Havini‘s practice reveals and responds to the violent colonial structures that have been imposed on the islands and their communities. She was joined by curator Margarida Mendes to discuss her recent projects, considering, for example, the subversion of deep-sea mapping through indigenous knowledges and the significance of sound as a tool for relating to sea landscapes.
As the need to move away from fossil fuel use becomes ever more urgent, two crucial works remind us of the terrible cost attached to our pursuit of ‘black gold’. Peter Mettler‘s startling aerial survey of the Alberta’s catastrophic tar sands extraction reveals the scale of the challenge, while long-time carbon cycle activist and writer James Marriott‘s new co-authored book brings the analysis back home. He was joined in conversation with Suzanne Dhaliwal, Climate Justice Creative, Campaigner and Co-Founder of the UK Tar Sands Network, following a week-long online screening of Petropolis.
Click here for more information about Ways of Knowing: Water/Fluidity and book your place for future events now.
