Curatorial Praxis: Unstitching Racism and Empathetic Repair

Curating Shared Histories

Tuesday 27 February, 5:30-7:30pm
IAS Forum

Orsod Malik

Spirit of the Pan-Yard

Tuesday 19 March, 5:30-7:30pm
IAS Common Ground

Sharmilla Beezmohun in conversation with Dominique Le Gendre 

Bio Dominique Le Gendre: Composer, Music Producer, co-founder/artistic director of StrongBack Productions, Dominique was born and brought up in Trinidad. She studied the classical guitar, while accompanying her local church choir and writing calypsos for the annual school calypso competition. Dominique trained as classical guitarist in Paris with Ramon de Herrera,  studied Harmony with Yvonne Desportes and Music Analysis with Christian Accaoui while studying Musicology at the Sorbonne.

London based for over 35 years, she has composed music for theatre, dance, art installations, film, television and radio drama for BBC Radio 3 and 4. She composed and produced all of the music for the Arkangel Complete Shakespeare collection directed by Clive Brill.

A former associate Artist of the Royal Opera House and Manning Camerata, Dominique’s music has been commissioned and performed internationally and in the UK by BBC Radio 3 Proms, Southbank Sinfonia, ORA Singers, Vasari Singers, Nevis Ensemble, Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra, Philharmonia Orchestra, Calabash Foundation for the Arts (Trinidad) and Turner Prize nominee Ingrid Pollard. Her concerto for orchestra, co-commissioned by the BBC Concert Orchestra and RTÉ Concert orchestra will receive its premiere in March 2024 and a new work for Australian piano/saxophone duo HDDuo will be recorded and performed across the Commonwealth from February 2024.

Bio Sharmilla Beezmohun: Sharmilla has worked in publishing since 1994, training at Virago and on Heinemann’s African and Caribbean Writers Series. For eleven years she was Deputy Editor of Wasafiri, the Magazine of International Contemporary Writing. In 2010 She co-founded Speaking Volumes Live Literature Productions with Sarah Sanders, joined a year later by Nick Chapman. Speaking Volumes’ literature and multimedia projects, tours and events in the UK and abroad all have a commitment to social justice and racial equality. Sharmilla also continues to work as a freelance editor.

In 2010 Sharmilla’s first novel, Echoes of a Green Land, was published in translation in Spain as Ecos de la tierra verde. She edited the academic collection Continental Shifts, Shifts in Perception: Black Cultures and Identities in Europe (2016); and, with Sarah White and Roxy Harris, co-edited A Meeting of the Continents: The International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books — Revisited (2005). An anthology celebrating ten years of Speaking Volumes entitled Not Quite Right for Us: Forty Writers Speak Volumes edited by Sharmilla was published by flipped eye in 2021. Her work has been published in various journals and translated into Finnish.

Sharmilla is a Trustee of Carcanet Publishers and also of the George Padmore Institute, an archive housing unique collections of material from pioneering Black British political and cultural organisations of the last seventy years. For many years she was on the International Organising Committee of AfroEurope@ns, a cross-continent academic and cultural network.

In 2019 Sharmilla became an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Uprooting Landscapes of Change

Wednesday 20 March, 5:30-7:30pm
IAS Common Ground