Creating Interference: making art, developing methods, re-imagining histories/memories

Creating Interference is an international symposium and network of researchers, artists and critics who creatively respond to and critically engage with memories and historical narratives.

Our aim is to develop, explore and identify creative strategies to disrupt knowledge conventions and dominant discourses of the past. Experimental art projects are seen as catalysts for change to knowledge about the past in order to inform and help transform our cultural lives in the present. To this end, we prioritise a de-colonial approach that necessitates a differently configured relationship with the past which overturns and decentres European hegemonic discourses of knowledge.

Creating Interference: making art, developing methods, re-imagining histories/memories

Among the exciting contributions were keynote speakers Christopher Cozier, artist, curator and co-director of Alice Yard art project space, Port-of-Spain, Trinidad and Karen Salt, interdisciplinary scholar in transnational American Studies and Afrodiasporic studies, University of Nottingham.

They were joined by a range of international contemporary artists, critics and scholars, whose works focused on:

– contemporary visual and particularly screen-based artworks as catalysts to archive practice

– decolonial methodologies as critical engagements to existing historical material/spaces and as visual strategies for creating cultural interventions

– art making reframed as contributions to progressive international cultural agendas (extending queer, feminist and postcolonial discourses) that critique contemporary neoconservative political and social climates

Creating Interference planning team:

Roshini Kempadoo, Reader and CREAM researcher, author of Creole in the Archive: Imagery, Presence and the Location of the Caribbean Figure (2017) and principle researcher for Creating Interference; Ashwani Sharma, principal lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies, University of East London and co-editor of the online journal Dark Matter; A’Ishah Waheed, co-founder of Patchwork Archivists and contributor to Skin Deep Magazine; Barby Asante, Artist, curator, educator and CREAM PhD researcher; Melanie Keen, Director of Iniva; Lucy Reynolds, CREAM researcher, curator and co-editor of The Moving Image Review & Art Journal (MIRAJ); and Bisan Abu Eisheh, Artist and CREAM PhD researcher.