CREATURE research centre director, Professor Wessie Ling has co-organised an event exploring cross-cultural entanglements and intersectional identities through clothes and cloth.
Date: 29 February 2024
The Research Centre for Creative Arts, Cultures and Engagement (CREATURE), working with the Institute of International Visual Art (iniva) and the Victoria & Albert Museum, have organised an event that revisits the work of the Clothes, Cloth & Culture Group (CCCG).
2024 marks the 10-year anniversary of the CCCG, which was a monthly event held in the library at iniva to discuss works of creative practitioners and thinkers across the spectrum of artists, designers, curators, academics, and activists whose work engages with clothes and cloth.
The CCCG was set up in the Stuart Hall Library, a specialist library that centres art and theory publications from the Global Majority, African, Asian, Caribbean, Polynesian, Latinx, and Diaspora perspectives. The library, named after the renowned Jamaican-British cultural theorist, one of the founding figures of British Cultural Studies or the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies, Stuart Hall, serves as the intellectual and social hub of iniva.
The event will draw on the legacy of the CCCG, reinterpreting Stuart Hall’s writings in the context of contemporary fashion, textiles, and fibre arts studies.
Exploring the legacy of Stuart Hall
Dr Christine Checinska, Senior Curator of Africa and Diaspora at the V&A museum and founder of CCCG summarised the event “Entangled Threads asks: how are today’s cross-cultural entanglements and intersectional identities explored, performed, and interpreted through clothes and cloth?”
Director of CREATURE, Professor Wessie Ling, commented that “we are honoured to co-organise this event to coincide with the 10-year anniversary of the passing of Professor Stuart Hall, a significant year to revisit Hall's notion of identity as a process of becoming in the context of clothes and cloth”.
As one of the event organisers, CREATURE will lead the discussion of the group to substantiate the University’s role in nurturing, supporting, and developing anti-racist and equitable spaces for artistic research. The reading group will commence with invited speakers, across the field of art, fashion, and textiles introducing their perspectives to enrich our collective reflection on how these questions might unfold in the present context.
A series of high-profile guests and speakers, key figures and emerging partitioners in art, curation, fashion, and design will be taking part in the event:
- Renata Branha (London-based Brazilian Designer)
- Michael McMillan (British born Vincentian writer-artist-curator, best known for The West Indian Front Room exhibition at The Museum of the Home)
- Péjú Oshin (British-Nigeria curator, Associate Dir of Gagosian, London)
- Anushka Tay (British Chinese artist-researcher)
- Anya Pantsil (London-based Welsh and Ghanaian artist)
- Dr Christine Checinska (Senior curator Africa and diaspora, lead curator of Africa Fashion, V&A Museum)
- Nick Brown (Librarian at iniva researching on Black British artist and print cultures)
- Prof Wessie Ling (Professor of Transcultural Arts and Design, London Met, director of CREATURE
Details and tickets for this event are available on the iniva programme.
