Research Dialogue

The LIVE EDITIONS programme includes a behind-the-scenes research strand which provides paid, albeit limited, time for artists and me as curator to meet, share thoughts, go on site visits and explore project ideas that require more resourcing and co-presenting partnerships than are viable in this first year of programming.

These aren’t commissions but opportunities for peer dialogue and exploration—spaces to imagine and consider the shape projects could take, and how and where they might meet audiences - the kind of exchanges that are vital and happen all the time before projects are developed and fully realised but which mostly go under the radar and tend to be unpaid, for systemic reasons, on the freelancer’s side.

I’m delighted to be working in this exploratory and open-ended way with artists Anna Maria Nabirye, Claudia Kappenberg, and Margarita Zafrilla Olayo as well as Jean Abreu & Michael Johnson in summer and autumn 2026.

Jean Abreu and I together with Jean’s producer Michael Johnson will be exploring how their project After Bliss might be presented in Eastbourne as part of a tour of the south coast. After Bliss traces the afterimage of Blue (1993), Derek Jarman’s last artwork, and explores themes of transmission, ancestry and intergenerational connection.

Rooted in Jean’s perspective as a Black, queer, immigrant artist, After Bliss – which is likely to take the form of an installation and performance - brings contemporary diasporic experience into dialogue with Jarman’s radical legacy. After Bliss asks what remains after Blue: how queer histories survive, how memory is transmitted through bodies, and how collective presence can become a form of care, resistance and intimacy.