Presented by John Hansard Gallery and The Box, this symposium is a collaboration between two coastal cities and a sharing of knowledge. Supported by The Paul Mellon Centre.
“A Day To Gather, To Heal, To Pause, To Purge, To Vomit, To Cry, To Breathe, To Lament, To Rage, To Repair, To Create.”
A solidarity curated by artist and writer Osman Yousefzada, culminating in a publication.
To accompany our current exhibition, With the certainty of tides, still I rise, we present a half-day symposium. A gathering of thinkers, academics for conversation, food, essays and presentations, serving as a catalyst and a launching pad around the ideas inherent in artist Osman Yousefzada’s work and his wider practice. The symposium brings together two central threads in Yousefzada’s practice: Intimacy, reflected in the deeply personal dimensions of his work and Tyranny, which engages with global narratives shaped by colonial histories. His recent exhibition at John Hansard Gallery and The Box move between these contrasting yet interrelated themes. Drawing on those exhibitions, the symposium will examine intimacy and tyranny through the broader perspectives of contemporary academic thought and artistic practice.
Symposium
At it’s heart, the Assembly focuses on Yousefzada’s Provocation: Intimacies & Tyrannies
“The maps of undersea data cables, mirror the surface of colonial and neo-colonial shipping routes. The visible disturbances echo the non-visible architectures; carrying codes, networks and databases of extraction. The turbulence mirrors each other, its violence, its ability to change our landscapes, our ecologies, our intimacies, our labour and its migratory patterns. And now that colonisation has satiated itself horizontally, this knowledge of extraction is used to expand and extract vertically. Coloniality does not die, it re-invents itself. The Symposium asks – How do contemporary knowledge systems echo colonial power dynamics and how are these wobbly histories, architectures, and timelines interconnected, and what radical shifts and intimacies are needed to reclaim these narratives?”
Tale of Two Coastal Cities: Tying two exhibitions at John Hansard Gallery and The Box
At John Hansard Gallery in With the certainty of tides, still I rise, Yousefzada presents three new commissions exploring migration, memory, and myth through sculpture, sound, and text. The sound of Mother (2025) reimagines furniture as a symbolic body of the mother ‘pregnant’ with seeping water, evoking intimacies in shared space. Looking for Baba (2025) features archival photos of lascars collaged with manats (prayers or promises). Indian sailors who served on P&O ships during the World Wars were integral to the colonial project. Yousefzada found these in Southampton Archives while tracing his lascar grandfather’s journeys between 1915 and 1944, who served on indentured contracts. These personal explorations expand into research on family, migration, and maritime history. Someone Died to Make Someone Else Free (2025), a large scale tapestry draws inspiration from the Waq-Waq Tree, a mythical tree in Islamic Foklore, situated in a land of abundance bearing human-like fruit. These commissions weave a narrative that connects us to sites of births and death, and the cyclical natures of giving and receiving life, bridging personal histories and collective memory.
Yousefzada’s wider practice resonates with themes explored in his earlier solo exhibition When Will We Be Good Enough? at The Box, Plymouth (2 November 2024–9 March 2025). The exhibition invites us to explore our colonial past, interrogate the realities of our present digital age and consider how they might be interlinked. In this thought provoking installation, Yousefzada combines historical collections from The Box with his sculptures and textiles, providing clues for us to consider. Boats loaded with cargoes symbolise colonial extraction from the Global South. They sail towards a carpet island surrounded by busts of digital ‘overseers’ as our ‘New Emperors’ who conduct an orchestra of everyday metal objects to emit a low hum, reflecting exploited lives and labour. Bringing the narrative full circle, tapestries of silhouetted queer figures peer out from the physical fringes. They suggest an alternative to power structures, a freer space from which we can engage a sometimes-hostile world.
Speakers include:
Dr Syed Mustafa Ali (Open University); Prof Louise Siddons (University of Southampton); Prof Alexandra Anikina (University of Southampton); Prof Dina Lupin (University of Southampton); Prof Stephanie Jones (University of Southampton); Prof Wolfgang Suetzl (Ohio University); Osman Yousefzada (Organisation); Dr Jaya Brekke (Nym); Dr Yaiza Hernández Velázquez (University of Southampton); Prof Tom Trevor (University of Exeter); Dr Omar Kholeif.
Download the schedule for the day here.
Please note, the Symposium will be filmed and there will be a photographer present throughout. If you do not wish to be included, please let a member of John Hansard Gallery staff know.
