Sheila is part of a new AHRC funded UAL project called Imagining India, which explores the memories, experiences, and relationship to India of first-generation South Asian communities in the UK. Initially the project runs weekly from Feb 2020 in Southall. Further details can be found on the Imagining India blog HERE and below:.
Sheila and Sue are currently part of of University of Reading’s 'Work in Progress' project in partnership with South Street Arts Centre.
'Work in Progress' is the second ACE funded project (led by Lucy Tyler and John Luther) in which artists develop new performances with the support of Minghella Studios and South Street, University of Reading Arts students and Reading communities.
To kick of their ‘Work in Progress’ residency Sheila and Sue presented Common Salt at MERL at the end of January, and will go on to make ‘Atmospheric Forces’ (a new work) and develop a Pollinator Event about Atmospheric Forces later on in the year…
Events and opportunities to get involved will be announced as the project develops.
Image of a display put together at MERL to accompany Common Salt
Sheila is part of a Performing Solidarity event next week… Further info and booking details below:
Performing Solidarity - Self-Organising, Self-Instituting
4 December at 7pm, Live Art Development Agency, London
Following our first event ‘Performing Solidarity - Making Common Cause’, please join us for a second gathering discussing the ways that solidarity can be organised and performed through the arts. In what ways can performance participate in the wider solidarity economy? How does performance function as a site for solidarity? Can performance practice offer specific models for organising solidarity? Each gathering brings together artists and representatives from the wider solidarity economy to share their creative and activist approaches. They are an invitation to collectively consider current social issues and alternative ways that artistic practices can offer with regard to creating new structures for relating and coexisting.
With Joon Lynn Goh, Sheila Ghelani, Rosalie Schweiker and Jane Trowell (Platform)
For booking (free of charge) please visit: http://www.thisisliveart.co.uk/whats-on/performing-solidarity-self-organising-self-instituting/
Organised and chaired by Noyale Colin (University of Winchester, Centre for Performance Practice and Research) and Stefanie Sachsenmaier (Middlesex University).
Further events to follow at the University of Winchester and Middlesex University in early 2020 - details forthcoming.
https://www.facebook.com/events/656383968226159/
Women's March, 2017. Image by Noyale Colin
Thanks to an Arts Council England grant Common Salt will be out and about again in 2019 & 2020.
To book tickets and keep up to date with when the piece will be on and where check HERE
The funding means a book about the work will be made in 2020 too.
If you saw the work in 2018, please tell your friends to come along! And if you wanted to see it but missed it, now's your chance.
Photo by Paul Samuel White
Sheila is pleased to be sharing Slow Story Slide Show at the In Between Time Summit in Bristol in October…
Further details HERE and below:
“It takes around 8 minutes for light from the sun to travel 96 million miles to reach our bodies. In just one second light can circle the earth 7 times. Yet, still… How long does it take to see something? To really see it?”
Slow Story Slide Show is an invitation to spend 15 minutes engaging in some slow looking and listening. A chance to take some time out and consider what (or whom) it is that you perhaps wouldn’t ordinarily notice…
10 participants at a time listen to a story about light whilst viewing a series of slides through desktop slide-viewers. Each slide is an image carefully selected from the Wellcome Collection picture library. The piece draws connections between Science and Art, intertwining them into a meditative story, carefully installed on a table top.
This event is part of the In Between Time Summit Day 3 programme. The event is included in the 1-Day Ticket or 3-Day Summit Pass and cannot be booked separately.
Photo of Slow Story Slide Show at Wellcome Collection by Lucy Cash
Sheila has been invited by Peterborough Presents to work with several groups of residents from Peterborough’s Bretton Estate to make something new. The work begins on September 2nd.
Watch this space for more information as the project unfolds…
Sheila has been invited to be on a panel at Creative People and Places and the Culture, Health and Wellbeing Alliance’s upcoming symposium The Art of Wellbeing.
The Art of Wellbeing
A symposium exploring the relationship between meaningful arts engagement and individual and community wellbeing.
A partnership between Creative People and Places and the Culture, Health and Wellbeing Alliance
University of Central Lancashire, Burnley Campus, 14 June 2019, 10.00 – 16.30
As part of Creativity and Wellbeing Week, this symposium hosted by the Creative People and Places network will explore the meeting places between the culture and health sectors, with a focus on wellbeing.
The event will put the relationship between collaborative and participatory art and the wellbeing of individuals and communities under the magnifying glass. Does working collaboratively with people to choose and create art that is of, with and by their community have a lasting impact on wellbeing? What about art's capacities to unsettle and challenge? Can art really make people feel better?
Further details can be found HERE
Sheila is contributing to an Open Space session at Heart of Glass in May facilitated by Chrissie Tiller (Creative Consultant and Practitioner) and Emma Fry (Criticality Producer, Heart of Glass), which asks:
How can we begin to take care of ourselves while working with, for and about others?
The session is Pay What You Can and is for anyone who is artistically engaged in social and collaborative arts practice.
For further details about the event click HERE
Chrissie Tiller
Chrissie Tiller is a passionate writer, thinker, teacher, and practitioner with a lifetime’s history of working through collaborative and social practice: particularly in cross-cultural and trans-national contexts and with places undergoing social, economic and political change. Her recent think piece for Creative People and Places, Power Up, explores the current state of collaborative arts practice: including examining notions of privilege, cultural capital, politics, personal values and ethics in bringing about cultural democracy and social justice.
Getting To Know You tea cups…
Sheila is delighted to have been awarded a Developing Your Creative Practice Grant by Arts Council England.
She will be using the grant to work with a mentor (instead of being the mentor herself for once), refresh her core artistic values, increase the visibility of her practice and gather some concrete strategies around ways to survive the next 20 years and thrive… Exciting and timely…
Image by Sheila Ghelani
Sheila has been invited to be part of a lab facilitated by Invisible Flock and Quicksand which will take place in Bangalore, India in February. The lab will facilitate a new network of artists and creatives from UK and India and build meaningful, cross-disciplinary collaborations within environmental and socially engaged practices.
The network will be formed of five delegates from the UK and five delegates from India, plus teams from Invisible Flock and Quicksand, who will meet and explore mutual connections during a three day Lab and UnBox 2019.
Three days working together in advance of the festival will result in a number of separate outputs for the festival in varying forms, eg workshops, installations, zines etc. Relationships and collaborations will be built through mutual interests and areas of focus, naturally facilitated during the first day of the lab.
Invisible Flock and Quicksand will work together during the same time period on a new project, mirroring the same process of development.
Click HERE to read more about the lab and follow its progress as it unfolds…
In January 2019, the new subscription based initiative ‘Scare The Horses’ in Exeter presented Common Salt (x 2 shows) to launch their new initiative and season of work at Southernhay House Hotel (once owned by William Kirkpatrick an East India Company Official).
Hear an interview with Sheila and Sue by Scare the Horses curator Paula Crutchlow HERE. With contributions from Deborah Clark owner of Southernhay House, and Dr Nicola Thomas, Cultural Geographer at University of Exeter.
Find out more about Scare The Horses HERE
This event took place on Thursday 31 January 6pm & 8.30pm
Image by Paul Samuel White