Art & Resistance

“My favorite word? It’s ‘act.’” Ai Weiwei

So many of us can tell the story of a moment when a piece of art - an image, a film, a song - made us feel the urgency of a particular moment, and the need for us to step into it. Art has always been part of protest but how this happens, and how it is received, varies endlessly.

In this event, bold and visionary interdisciplinary artists explore art as a vehicle for protest. Rooted in a variety of expressions and forms, they come together to discuss how needs for change and resistance shape their art, allowing it to reach the lives of others in new ways, and how radical politics and creativity go hand in hand.

Our speakers:

Clementine E Burnley is a feminist migrant mother, writer, and trainee psychotherapist. She lives in Edinburgh. Her work has appeared or is upcoming in Magma, the Poetry Review, and the 2022 Flipped Eye Anthology "_Before Then, We_". She's a 2021 Royal Society of Literature Sky Arts Award Winner, an alumnus of Obsidian Foundation, and a 2021 Edwin Morgan Second Life Grantee.

Janine Booth is a Marxist motormouth who travels the UK and beyond reciting ranting, rhyming and revolting poetry at gigs, festivals and picket lines, tackling subjects from sexual violence to mental health, the Grenfell Tower fire to hating Tories. She is also an activist and trade unionist (RMT striker). Her non-poetry books include Minnie Lansbury: suffragette, socialist, rebel councillor (Five Leaves, 2018), Autism Equality in the Workplace: removing barriers and challenging discrimination (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2016), Plundering London Underground: New Labour, private capital and public service 1997–2010 (Merlin Press, 2013), and Guilty and Proud of It: Poplar’s rebel councillors and guardians 1919–1926 (Merlin Press, 2009). She has plenty to say about art (particularly poetry and punk) and resistance, and comes to us straight from supporting punk legends the Newtown Neurotics at the Voodoo Rooms the previous evening.

Patricia Macdonald is an environmental/cultural-landscape researcher, writer and academic (since 2004 Honorary Fellow, University of Edinburgh & Edinburgh College of Art) and an award-winning artist-photographer. Her powerful, boundary-crossing environmental aerial imagery – made in collaboration with her partner Professor Angus Macdonald of the University of Edinburgh – is commissioned, exhibited and published internationally, spanning fine-art and editorial contexts. She is the author, co-author and editor of ten books/catalogues, including Shadow of Heaven (1989); Order & Chaos (1990); Views of Gaia (1992); Once in Europa/Einst in Europa (1999/2000, with John Berger); Airworks (2001); and The Hebrides: An Aerial View of a Cultural Landscape (2010, with Angus Macdonald) and Surveying the Anthropocene: Environment and Photography Now (2022).

Jess Brough is a writer and active member of the Scottish BPOC Writers Network. Their fiction can be found in Extra Teeth, The Best of British Fantasy 2019 anthology and seed head, an anthology of new writing from The Future is Back series led by Olumide Popoola. Their poetry and non-fiction can be found in The Colour of Madness (Updated Edition), The Bi-Bible: New Testimonials and at gal-dem, The Skinny, Fringe of Colour and The Glasgow Film Festival.

Jess has just finished their PhD in Psychology, with a thesis on social biases of language production and comprehension.

Twitter: @Jessica_Brough | @FringeofColour

Instagram: @jessbrough | @fringeofcolour