Programme Leaders
Rajinder Singh came to Alien Embodiments as a choreographer and movement based artist. His work is in the national permanent collection of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, The Glucksman Museum and the Arts Council of Ireland. He is the Artist-in Residence, MA Race, Migration and Decolonial Studies, University College Dublin with Dr Alice Feldman since 2019. Rajinder is a
member of artist collective Art Nomads and a member of Temple Bar Artist Studios and Gallery.
Following two decades of working in Ireland at the intersections of aesthetics, epistemology and pedagogy both in and outside of the university, the MA that Alice Feldman established in the School of Sociology had been running for two years when she and Rajinder began their work together. At the centre of the programme are decolonial experiments around embodied knowledges, pluriversality and re-existence.
Panelists
Temitope Bademosi is an ardent believer in ‘beauty in diversity’ and is intrigued by and works in the space of cultural encounters. Her research interest launches from the premise of the decoloniality of being, weaving its way through epistemologies of the global south, embodied knowledges and cultural contact zones. Pluriversality and cognitive/knowledge justice are central to her field of work. She is currently expressing her transformative praxis of re-imagining/being/doing by balancing the stories of Western hegemonic discourses with voices that emanate from in-between the borders.
Subhashini Goda Venkataramani is an interdisciplinary artist and an academic from Chennai, India, specialising in the dance form of Bharatanatyam. She has been practising and performing for close to three decades and has taught the dance form for well over fifteen years. With a masters in English literature and another Erasmus international joint masters in Dance Anthropology, the core of her artistic practice revolves around traditions, transgressions, and memories and her academic work centres on migration and identity. She is currently pursuing an interdisciplinary PhD, funded by the IRC, at University College Dublin on the practice of Bharatanatyam in the Indo-Irish diaspora, and has given performances and workshops at a couple of festivals in Ireland.
Niamh Asha Munglani is a half-Irish, half-Indian British historian and artist from Bristol, UK. Through her work, she aims to address colonial amnesia in British Public History. Through examination of history curricula and textbooks, she is cultivating a decolonial praxis around how this information can be displayed visually and most accessible to the broad public. Her work is underpinned by her lived experiences of being a mixed-race woman navigating and deconstructing her lived identities.
Victory Nwabu-Ekeoma is an Igbo-Irish writer, artist, and researcher. She has an interest in health-related knowledge communication and creative knowledge translation. Her practice is continually engaged in zine-making and publishing, having worked on and contributed to several artist-led publications independently and collaboratively. She is the founder and editor of Bia! — a publication exploring immigration, food, and culture. Victory is currently a Being-in-Residence at The Bureau.
Candace Thomas is a “Showmen”-Traveller doctoral student in the School of Sociology at UCD. Her work explores being (vs ‘belonging’), unsettlement and placemaking in the “Showmen”- Traveller and Yazidi Refugee communities to realize the use of decolonial service design in the Third Sector. Through an ongoing collaboration, she is cultivating a multi-phase decolonial praxis of consultation and workshopping, development and programme delivery that uses creative mediums like “Dialectograms” to map each communities unique value systems.
Charlotte van Braam explores art-making as decolonial praxis where she focuses on exploring embodied knowledge and identity. As part of the post-colonial diaspora, she centres understanding of her positionality and relationality linked to colonialism and mixed-race identity. This, in turns, forms the basis of her research in decolonial museum practices and geographies, and diaspora-led exhibitions as decolonial practices.
