Free, booking essential
Join us for a collective reading of excerpts from Nina Mingya Powles’ Small Bodies of Water (2021) led by curator Dot Zhihan Jia.
Weaving together personal recollections and dreams, elements of folklore, and natural events, Powles’ writing explores how in moments of uncertainty we can seek to recognise, form and hold onto belongingness and connection. Readers are invited to reflect on the ways we become attached to a place and how we can find intimacy within displacement.
No prior reading is required and you are welcome to listen in. The only requirement is to read together and listen carefully.
DOT ZHIHAN JIA
Dot Zhihan Jia (she/her) is a Manchester-based curator whose practice is closely affiliated with decolonial, feminist modes of togetherness and peripheral storytelling. She approaches curating as a way to give space, to care, to confront and to be together. She currently works as the associate curator at esea contemporary in Manchester. She is a working group member of the Feminist Duration Reading Group, and co-editor of chán, a bilingual magazine documenting the food memories of the Sinophone diaspora in the UK and beyond. Dot is the awardee of Shanghai Power Station of Art’s Emerging Curator Award 2021 for the exhibition The Dwelling Place of the Other in Me.
EXERCISES IN EXCHANGE
Exercises in Exchange is a series of public events and engagement activities concerned with alternative economies. Devised by Fiona Irene Graf, recipient of the 2023 Spike Island Engagement Fellowship for South West-based curators, Exercises in Exchange thinks through the possibilities of inter-mutual relationships and transboundary networks of reciprocity, asking how we can establish more nurturing, sustainable ways of being and interrelating within both human and non-human communities. In the face of ongoing economic and climate crises, the programme stresses the urgency to generate more equal economic structures based on kinship, collaboration and co-governance, and circularity.
