Open School East (OSE) is a free, independent art school located at 39 Hawley Square, Margate. OSE’s Associates Programme hosts a group of artists for one year, biannually, to think, make and learn together and near each other. Now in our second term, we invite you to a multidimensional events programme taking place throughout Margate. This event series emerges from our individual and collective interests, and in response to this year’s curriculum: processes of co-learning; resistance to and reassembly of power structures; and connection through language and sound. Across sonic experiences, collaborative making, artist talks, and subversive cinema, the programme will call you to move Towards the Edges—further from categorisation, and closer to improvisation and uncertainty.

Towards the Edges is organised and led by OSE’s Associates 2026: Milly Aburrow, Serena Mirambeau Brey, Hannah Chaney, Annabelle Edginton, Ffion Colquhoun-O’Brien, Ezekiel, Clara Frain-Atallah, Imogen Naomi Herd, Eve Jefferies, Suds McKenna, Cara Murray, Dre Spisto, Helen Savage and Awra Tewolde-Berhan.

We’re excited to announce our continued partnership with Turner Contemporary who are generously hosting part of the programme, and we look forward to presenting events at Ark.

You can find the schedule for this years programme below ~ all events held as part of the programme are FREE and booking is required – ticket links for events are typically released 3 weeks prior to start dates.

For enquiries regarding the programme, please contact: george@openschooleast.org

Upcoming Events:

#3: Ticket of No Return – Film screening of Ulrike Ottinger

🗓️ Wednesday 25 March, 6:00-7:30pm
📍 Turner Contemporary, Margate CT9 1HG

Join us for a special one-off screening of Ticket of No Return (1979), a cult classic by German filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger. Bold, surreal, and darkly comic, the film follows a woman’s deliberate descent into excess, unfolding as a striking critique of social norms, gender roles, and bourgeois respectability.

#4: Who writes the score? – Sound and notation workshop with Shamica Ruddock

🗓️ Wednesday 8 April, 6:00-7:30pm
📍 Turner Contemporary, Margate CT9 1HG

This workshop explores what a sonic score could be. Working in a small group alongside artist and composer Shamica Ruddock, participants will explore the process of sounding and note taking in a collectively held space where anything (and everything) can be a sound. Using a variety of notational and drawing techniques, we will map a journey together and reflect on our sonic curiosities; reflecting on how rhythms in sound and space, our memories and our bodies shift and envelope in communal spaces.

#5: Open Wave-Receivers – DIY radio-making with Shortwave Collective

🗓️ Saturday 25 April, 5:00-8:00pm
📍 Open School East, Margate CT9 1NZ

Join Shortwave Collective member ​Alyssa Moxley to learn about and build a simple homemade radio receiver, an ‘Open Wave-Receiver’. Participants will be engaged as co-researchers and experimenters, working with a basic set of materials.

Following the construction of our DIY Open Wave-Receivers, we’ll explore the local area together, searching for signals and attaching our radios to metal structures as makeshift antennas, incorporating urban fixtures into the radio circuit.

#6: My beautiful side of the archive – Listening session with Palestinian Sound Archive

🗓️ Saturday 2 May, 2:00-4:00pm
📍 ARK Cliftonville Cultural Space, Margate CT9 2HP

Palestinian Sound Archive is a celebration of music, spoken word and album artwork from historic Palestine, mainly from the 1960s – 1990s. This event explores archival practice as a decolonial methodology and act of resistance, through sharing archival sounds and images that preserve and document Palestinian heritage, culture and resistance. This listening session features sounds from the Majazz Project, Palestinian Sound Archive and friends.

#7: listening, listening, images – sound & performance workshop with Sophie Mak Schram

🗓️ Saturday 16 May, 2:00-4:00pm
📍 ARK Cliftonville Cultural Space, Margate CT9 2HP

This workshop explores listening as a critical and performative practice through Tina Campt’s Listening to Images (2017). Using lecture par arpentage—a reading method developed in workers’ circles for collective education—we will approach the text collaboratively, fragmenting and sharing its ideas through group discussion and vocal interpretation. Drawing on this shared reading, we will then work together to create a recorded sonic lecture, experimenting with voice, sound, and collective listening.

#8: After the flush: Exploring the aesthetics and politics of waste/water through creative practice – Artist talk with Bryony Gillard 

🗓️ Saturday 27 May, 6:00-7:30pm
📍 Turner Contemporary, Margate CT9 1HG

In this workshop we will embark on reading, watching, writing, listening and creative exercises that expand on the murky topic of wastewater. In a context where wastewater spills regularly affect beaches across Thanet and recent power outages at water treatment sites affecting local drinking water supplies, this workshop is a space to explore our individual and civic relationships to wastewater through discussion and creative practice.

#9: Roadside Magic and Vergeside Charms – Artist talk and folk-making workshop with Libby Bove

🗓️ Wednesday 3 June, 6:00-7:30pm
📍 Turner Contemporary, Margate CT9 1HG

Join us for an evening talk with Libby Bove where she will talk about her creative practice and the ongoing journey of mythmaking and collaboration with The Museum of Roadside Magic. The talk will be followed by a hands-on workshop, with plenty of time for questions and discussion, in which you can make your own raw clay vergeside charm, using wildflower seeds and foraged foliage.

Past Events

#1: Symposium – In-conversation with Jesse Darling

🗓️ Wednesday 25 February, 5:45-7:30pm
📍 Cliftonville Community Centre, Margate CT9 2DB

Join OSE Associates Clara Frain-Atallah and Cara Murray, alongside artist and Turner Prize winner Jesse Darling, for an open group conversation inspired by the classical symposium, a shared space where ideas are exchanged, tested, and reshaped collectively.

The conversation will draw on themes central to Jesse’s current practice and interests, including materials that carry both physical and symbolic weight; systems of care, control, and neglect; and the structures—architectural, institutional, and linguistic—that shape how we live together.

#2: SEANCES: Rebirth – Sound and automatic writing workshop with RIEKO

🗓️ Saturday 14 March, 12:00-2:00pm
📍 Turner Contemporary, Margate CT9 1HG

In preparation for the Spring Equinox—a symbol of renewal, transformation, and spiritual balance—we invite you to 𝘚𝘌𝘈𝘕𝘊𝘌𝘚 𝘣𝘺 𝘙𝘐𝘌𝘒𝘖: 𝘙𝘦𝘣𝘪𝘳𝘵𝘩, a multi-sensory sound experience and automatic writing workshop led by artist and composer RIEKO. Set on the ground floor of Turner Contemporary, with the ocean as a backdrop, participants will be guided on a journey designed to awaken their intuition and creative potential, connecting past, present, and future selves through a collective experience.