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  • Due to unforeseen circumstances this talk is cancelled

Due to unforeseen circumstances this talk is cancelled

Borders divide workers and families, fuel racial division, and reinforce global disparities and colonisation. They encourage the expansion of technologies of surveillance and control, which impact both migrants and citizens.

In this talk, Gracie Mae Bradley, co-author of Against Borders, sets out the case for abolishing borders. Drawing on over a decade of campaigning against the hard edges of state power, Bradley outlines how our world is currently structured along multiple axes of oppression and colonisation to immobilise, immiserate and impoverish people, to the detriment of our collective flourishing. Bradley reflects on how the project of border abolition is one of reimagination and building a world yet to come, rather than simply tearing down fences, walls, and detention camps. Bradley focusses our attention on the importance of speculative fiction in bringing abolitionist imaginaries to life, drawing on the significance of her art practices for her political work.

Bradley’s talk will be followed by in conversation with Dr John Wilkins, Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Enterprise Fellow working with both Trinity College Dublin and IMMA. Together, we reflect on some of the arguments of this elegant and powerful book – that invites us to dream of a reconfigured world of global solidarity, where the borders between nation states no longer control and define us, and where people and states in the global south can better mitigate the climate crisis. This talk also draws on themes from our current exhibition, Howardena Pindell A Renewed Language.

Presented as part of IMMA Outdoors and will be followed by Free Music in Courtyard, featuring all ‘living things’.


About Speakers

Gracie Mae Bradley is is a thinker, writer and campaigner with interests in civil liberties, migration, surveillance, and state racism. Gracie has over ten years’ experience in the UK NGO sector, including over a year as Director of the pressure group Liberty. She is the host of the Stuart Hall Foundation’s Locating Legacies podcast, co-author of Against Borders, and author of From Grenfell to Windrush which appears in “After Grenfell: Violence, Resistance and Response” (Pluto Press, 2019). Her political writing has appeared in The Guardian, OpenDemocracy, The Independent, Vice, and many more publications. Her first short story, Peacetime, was published by Salvage Magazine #13 (2022), and her poem Unlawful Gathering appears in When This Is Over: Reflections on an Unequal Pandemic (Policy Press, 2023). Gracie is a keen swimmer and forager in her spare time.

Dr John Wilkins identifies as U.S.-Black and Gay. Dr Wilkins earned his B.A. from Franklin & Marshall College, in Lancaster Pennsylvania; and earned his MA in English Literature from the L’Université de Montréal, Canada. His thesis dealt with “Goddess Imagery in the Novels of Toni Morrison”. Dr Wilkins earned his doctorate from Trinity College Dublin’s School of English where he interrogated representations of “Black Gay Male Identity in the Afri-can Diaspora”. Dr Wilkins is the Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Enterprise Fellow working with both Trinity College Dublin and IMMA. He is Interrogating themes of race and identity within aspects of IMMA’s programmes and exhibitions including The Otolith Group Xenogenesis and Howardena Pindell – A Renewed Language/.


About Exhibition

HOWARDENA PINDELL – A RENEWED LANGUAGE
30 Jun 2023–30 Oct 2023
Main Galleries, West Wing

IMMA is delighted to present Howardena Pindell’s first solo exhibition in Ireland. Embellishing the language of minimalism – of circles, grids, tallies and repetition – in a visibly laborious process of hole-punching, spraying, cutting, sewing, and numbering, Pindell creates works with complex and sumptuous material surfaces.

Now in her 80th year – Howardena Pindell continues to create art that deals with issues including enslavement, violence against indigenous populations, police brutality, the AIDS crisis and climate change. Alongside the paintings and works on paper of past and more recent works, the exhibition includes two videos that frame a long career – Free, White and 21 (1980) and Rope/Fire/Water (2020). These works tackle the pervasiveness of racial inequality, drawing on Pindell’s own experiences and on her collation of historical data relating to segregation, discrimination and race-based violence in America. More details here