ABsence: Awkward Bastards 2 – Documentation

ABsence: Awkward Bastards 2 (AB2) was symposium that took place at mac, Birmingham on 23 March 2017 and brought together artists, activists, thinkers, and producers to rethink ideas around diversity.

AB2 was a collaboration between DASH, mac and LADA.

Here you can find –

• AB2 Programme and Biographies
• Commissioned responses to AB2 by the writers Mary Paterson and Poppy Noor
• The films of Frances Morris’s keynote speech and The Disabled Avant-Garde’s presentation (see bottom of page)
• DASH’s YouTube channel featuring documentation of all presentations and panels

AB2, and the first Awkward Bastards symposium at mac in March 2015, have created unprecedented contexts to engage with the spectrum of diversity from disability, ethnicity, and sexuality, to gender and class.

AB2 featured artists’ presentations, keynote speeches, panel debates, a live portrait painting by: Frances Morris (Tate Modern), Tony Heaton (Shape), Mohammed Ali (artist), Rachel Anderson (Idle Women), Daniel Oliver (artist), Jamila Johnson Small (artist/organiser), Simon Casson (Duckie), Tanya Raabe-Webber (artist), Sue Austin (artist), Melanie Keen (Iniva), Nick Llewellyn & Cian Binchy (Access All Areas), David A Bailey (International Curators Forum), Aaron Wright (Fierce Festival), Helga Henry (Birmingham Hippodrome), Sarah Watson & Thompson Hall (Creative Minds), Rachel Gadsden (artist), Rachael Savage (Vamos Theatre), Julie McNamara (artist), Katherine Araniello & Aaron Williamson (The Disabled Avant-Garde), Caroline Parker(artist), and Lara Ratnaraja (Cultural consultant).

Following an open call for proposals, AB2 also featured short provocations for a Radical Practices open mic session:  Vera Boysova (Objectify Me), Alex Leggett (Posthuman Autistic does some shit things and fails horribly), Catherine Hoffmann (Stenchwench Presents Ten Tips On Being Feckless And Poor Whilst Pretending Not To Be), Jane Thakoordin & Riffat Bashir (Don’t Tell Me I Am Hard To Reach), Lewis Devey (Kaepernick My Kaepernick), Sexcentenary (I Just Said That), Nicholas Tee (This Chink Is Going Gold),Faye Claridge (Moor-ish), Rinkoo Barpaga (Language, Limited World), Priya Mistry (Inviting Discomfort – Broken & Tropical), and Ben Spatz (Behold How Good).

Frances Morris: ‘Diversity in the Institution’