Join Art/Work Association’s next session on Tuesday 2nd April for ‘Return to God: Speculative Imageries and Religious Futurisms.’

In this event, historical ethnobotanist Jonn Gale and artist/director Shireen McCormack discuss how their shared experience of religion and spirituality has shaped their practices.

Drawing on their ongoing collaboration to reframe the metaphysical, they will explore auto-ethnography as a radical method, its importance in de-colonial practices, and their shared interest in archives as a mode to discover the unseen and marginalised.

This event has been organised by artist and A/WA member Shireen McCormack. The session is free to attend and will be held on Zoom. Please register by emailing info(at)artworkassociation.org.⁠

Jonn Gale is a London based Bulgarian-Nigerian ethnobotanist who uses speculative frameworks and visual ethnography as means for conducting hidden histories research and stimulating repair and reactivation across material and digital botanical archives. Their work centres on nonlinearity, multi-species justice, and the sensorial. Jonn is currently undertaking a practice led AHRC/CHASE Collaborate Doctorate at Birkbeck, UoL and the Linnean Society of London, investigating the contributions of Black and Indigenous collectors and naturalists to eighteenth and nineteenth-century natural knowledge. Their research involves the study of botanical specimens and manuscripts held at the Linnean Society of London, identifying and tracing hidden actors, mapping knowledge networks, and developing a new decolonial approach for recovering and sharing information from this archive.

Shireen McCormack is a multi-disciplinary artist and director currently based in London. She works with moving image, performance, sound and text on themes of religious-futurism, queerness, memory and grief through symbolic elements. Shireen works with sound individually and with music collective BVSN. BVSN’s latest work “Light of the Abyss” was performed at Volksbühne in Berlin, October 2023. Shireen studied Anthropology and Visual Practice at Goldsmiths, which drew her to auto-fiction and auto-ethnography to reframe and convey personal narratives and stories through moving image. Her films mother’s place (2022) screened at Girls in Film festival 2022 and Aiming at the Apocalypse (2023) premiered at the Queer Fringe! Festival 2023. Weaker Vessel (2023), a film she made in collaboration with the ICA and Other Cinemas will be exhibited at the ICA in April. She has performed at Somerset House and Saatchi Gallery.