Date: December 2020
Location: Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam
This event took place as part of the BOOKS series of events at Melly (formerly known as Witte de With Center for Contemporary Arts). In this session we had the pleasure of introducing and discussing books that we love!
This session introduces publications that have conceptualised sociopolitical critiques, through non-Western frames of thinking, on normative orders within which one has to survive. Thematically, the session covers a wide range including reversing the white gaze, de-centring knowledges, everyday practices of subversion, living between sanity and insanity, and cleaning one’s own house and mind. In this session we not only look into the content of the publications, but also the various linguistic and visual formats through which they form a critique; as well as the very practices of publishing that strategise for a critical end. The list concludes with two of Sarmad’s own publications.
- Look! A White: Philosophical Essays on Whiteness, by George Yancy (2012)
- A Question of Power, by Bessie Head (1973)
- Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms, by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1992)
- Buddhism and Whiteness: Critical Reflections, by George Yancy et al. (2019)
- A Monk’s Guide to a Clean House and Mind, by Shoukei Matsumoto (2018)
- How to Disappear, by Haytham El-Wardany (2018, Kayfa-ta)
- Brodsky & Utkin, by Alexander Brodsky, Ilya Utkin (1991)
- The Anti-White Space, by Samiha Meem (2017, self-published)
- Decolonising the University, by Gurminder Bhambra, Dalia Gebrial, Kerem Nişancıoğlu (2018)
- Un-Making Image, a collection of eleven publications by Sarmad (2017-2020)
- Amateur Photography: A Gender-Based Construct, from the New Woman to the Wife, by Sarmad (2018)
