Panel Discussion: Thinking through Play – Lola Olufemi, Zarina Muhammad and Róisín Tapponi
Join curators Mahamed Abdullahi and Matilde Silva Fry for an open-ended discussion with guest speakers Lola Olufemi, Zarina Muhammad and Róisín Tapponi. This is an opportunity to expand on the curatorial themes of Notes on Play, by discussing the creative capacities of active listening, the politics of play and the effects and meaning of the archival itself.
Biography
Lola Olufemi is a black feminist writer and CREAM/Stuart Hall foundation researcher from London. Her work focuses on the uses of the feminist imagination and its relationship to cultural production, political demands and futurity. She is author of Feminism Interrupted: Disrupting Power (2020), Experiments in Imagining Otherwise, forthcoming from Hajar Press in 2021 and a member of ‘bare minimum’, an interdisciplinary anti-work arts collective.
Zaria Muhammad is a writer and an art critic at the Whitepube. She writes about exhibitions, institutions and other little bits in between. Cancer sun/aries moon/sagittarius ascendant. ‘Intellectual charlatan’, ‘sociopathic pseudo-critic’, leading proponent of ‘The Philosophy of the Warm Tummy’ & cowboy in the art world.
Róisín Tapponi is a film curator, programmer and writer based in London. She is Founder of Habibi Collective, an open resource, digital archive and platform for women’s cinema from South-West Asia and North Africa; she is Founder CEO of Shasha, the world’s first independent streaming service for SWANA cinema; and Founder Editor-in-Chief of ART WORK Magazine, a site of critical inquiry for cultural workers. Tapponi has directed six film festivals including Independent Iraqi Film Festival (IIFF), and has curated exhibitions at institutions such as Museum of Modern Art (MoMA; NYC), Sharjah Art Foundation (SAF; Sharjah) and MAAT (Lisbon), where she is currently showing a six-month moving-image exhibition, commissioned by Art Jameel.