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Book launches
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Talks
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Exhibitions
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Publications
✳︎ Book launches ✳︎ Talks ✳︎ Exhibitions ✳︎ Publications
Upcoming Events
See below for upcoming events, talks and workshops.
Image taken at the event ‘Art for a Climate Changed World’ at Mimosa House London for Climate Art Week 2025. Curated by Suzanne Dhaliwal for an emotional reflection and collective grounding as COP30 unfolded.
Games Transformed Festival 2026 and MOTHERLODE (Party)
Play, Rebellion, Imagination: Radical games beyond the console is scheduled for 1:00pm on Saturday, October 31 at the Games Transformed Festival.
Here to Stay, Here to Play
This year’s theme is Here to Stay, Here to Play. Inspired by the slogan “Here to Stay, Here to Fight” used by migrant and anti-racist communities as a statement of defiance against racism. Over three days, we’ll explore how racial justice and migrant justice are part of the same fight, and how games can help us resist the systems that try and push our communities out.
And in 2026, this is more important than ever.
Far-right racists are attacking racialised and migrant communities across the UK, attacks on mosques are happening every five days, and governments intent on pushing through more and more cruel immigration policies that criminalise the right to move.
Monday, November 16, 2026, 6:00PM to 7:30PM (EST)
Where does the sensual live within an interdependent Black ecology? Through what poetics, aesthetics and pleasures might these Black Intimate Ecologies be traced both on the African continent and across the Black diaspora? Might such a praxis of tracing, through speculation, raw clay work and decolonial image analysis, queer how we configure ecology itself?
This talk rolls through wet soil and through raw clay with fat, Black, and queer feminist processes of intradisciplinary research and decolonial visual analysis to language/make visible the importance and perseverance of sensual erotic relations between Black communities, and in particular fat Black bodies and the more-than-human: earth, fungi, plants, animals, insects, bodies of water, bodies of weather, bodies of gas. Engaging methodologies of endarkened storywork and critical fabulation, Intimate Ecologies is praxis, ritual, and speculation. This unworlding story is both a meditation on Black queer resistances of climate colonialism and an invocation of Black queer insistences on fleshy, abundant, liberatory interspecies futures.
Introduced by Heather Davis.
Online
The Land and Body: Feminist and Indigenous Conversations
Wednesday 18 November || 6:30 - 7:30pm
Free, booking essential - book here
What does it mean to understand land not as something we own or occupy, but as something with which we share histories, relationships and responsibilities? And what might become possible when we move beyond familiar distinctions between humans and nature, bodies and landscapes?
Taking Autograph’s exhibition Our Bodies Have Been Bridges, which explores how bodies carry memory, ancestry and histories of displacement, as a starting point, this online conversation brings together anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena and writer, artist and scholar Ama Josephine Budge Johnstone to explore how Indigenous knowledges and Black queer feminist thought can reshape our understanding of the living world. The discussion will be chaired by writer and broadcaster Zakia Sewell, whose work re-examines British folklore, mythology and cultural identity, tracing how histories of migration and cultural exchange are carried through music, ritual and traditions rooted in the body.
Pathways for Art and Transdisciplinary Collaboration in Ecosocial Change
11–12 September 2026
International Conference hosted by the Centre for Art and Ecology, Goldsmiths, University of London.
Doing Ecology Otherwise addresses the imaginative, sensory, material and embodied capacities of art to address urgent ecological challenges. Drawing on essential insights from Natasha Myers and Lola Olufemi on the potentiality of imagining and acting ‘otherwise’, the conference explores how art can hold space for new understandings, practices, relations and structures of feeling that may be marginalized in mainstream scientific and environmental action.
AAL Lab Convening: Ilẹ̀ Mọ Wa - The Land Knows Us
Join us on 18 September 2026 at UCL East, London, for Ilẹ̀ Mọ Wa — The Land Knows Us, a convening exploring land, memory and living archives as part of the African Arts Libraries Lab (AAL Lab) Contemporary Art and Archive Practices (CAAP) series, within the framework of the Re:assemblages programme, in partnership with the Bartlett School of Architecture (BSA) at UCL.
Event Details
Date: 18th September 2026
Session One: 3:00pm - 5:00pm
Session Two: 6:00pm - 9:00pm
Location: UCL East Campus, One Pool Street, Stratford, E20 2AF, UCL Urban Room & One Pool Street Cinema (Auditorium)
Saturday 26th September
2pm - 4pm
Mimosa House, London
While parenting and care have gained visibility as subject matter in contemporary art, little has changed structurally for the artists who live these experiences. This book launch marks 13 years of grassroots cultural work at the intersection of art & care, and an opportunity to both celebrate the change made over the last decade, and amplify its impact by continuing cross-sector collaborations and bringing to the public works that address care both as subject and as infrastructure: a reference for new ways of gathering, how artists and audiences participate, at what hours and in what formats.
Slower Modes of Sensing Our World
Join us online on 7 October 2026, 14:00–15:15, for Slower Modes of Sensing Our World, the first event in UP Projects' latest Constellations ° Assemblies: The Work of Looking After Each Other series that explores how commissioners, curators and cultural workers can support artists, communities and their teams to work with care.
Slower Modes of Sensing Our World considers how artists create spaces to hold grief collectively, how commissioning can support this work, and what slower approaches to commissioning and curating might offer when responding to the contemporary ecological and health crisis.
Alaq (still) by Pallavi Paul. Image: Courtesy of the artist.
WHEN WE WIN: WRITING OUR FUTURES
Migrants in Culture Saturday School 2026
Saturday School is a creative practice space for organisers to imagine, embody and design for border abolition.
We aim to strengthen the creative and embodied leadership needed for a visionary and sustainable movement ecology, able to move effectively together through the polycrises of our time, towards a world without borders.
Writing Our Legacy
This talk will offer an insight into Dr. Ama Josephine Budge Johnstone’s intradisciplinary research around the topic of Intimate Ecologies, a framework for holding together Blackness, ecology, pleasure and queer futurity.
I Waterways: Arteries, Rhythms and Kinship
Tate
Ama Josephine Budge Johnstone and Emilie Glazer
Waterways: Arteries,Rhythms and Kinship was a three-day symposium exploring how water binds us across histories and futures. Organised by Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational in partnership with Hyundai Motor, the event ran from 18 to 20 October 2024, with a two-day conference at Tate Modern followed by a day of workshops delivered by the artists Taey Iohe, Jumana Emil Abboud and Julie Gough at sites across London. In Part 1 of this review, Ama Josephine Budge Johnstone reflects on the conference and Julie Gough’s workshop, The Mire, at Bankside Pier; in Part 2, Emilie Glazer discusses Taey Iohe’s Messengers and Jumana Emil Abboud’s Your reflection on the gentle sea, both at Walthamstow Wetlands, east London.
