What is the role of cultural workers and artists within movements?
How can we build and vision our political engagement beyond critique alone?
Which methods can inspire creative strategy to shift mainstream culture?
How can we move beyond urgency towards building sustainable cultural infrastructures outside of institutions?

This open forum hosted by OSE Alumnus Sarah Al Sarraj invites cultural workers, artists and organisers to collectively think through past and emerging practices of cultural solidarity. Joined by creator, writer and educator Aditi Ahalya Jaganathan, we will reflect on our roles, and how we can respond creatively to collective liberation, and the movements in DR Congo, Haiti, Kurdistan, Iran, Palestine and Sudan.

Attendees are invited to come with questions and ideas, aimed at building a wider framework of sustainable cultural infrastructures beyond institutions.

This event is part of our In Response programme strand, devised in a yearlong collaboration in 2023 between Mosaic Rooms and Open School East part of our Alumni Development Strand.

Sarah Al Sarraj is a visual artist and cultural worker. Her practice spans painting, comics, and moving image. She is currently developing an animation practice having been awarded a grant from the Arts Council. Her practice cultivates a visual language that aims to disrupt hierarchies of authority and knowledge production while imagining liberated futures. She is currently exploring notions of subjectivity, spirituality, and metaphysics, as they relate to the natural world. She currently works on building community-led public health at Healing Justice London and previously worked at Forensic Architecture and within Palestinian advocacy.. Al-Sarraj was an Open School East Associate in 2021-22.

Aditi Ahalya Jaganathan is a thinker, creator, writer and dreamer. Having worked at the intersections of law, culture and politics, Aditi creates spaces of (un)learning as a site of radical praxis, using tools of music, film and visual culture. She teaches her own course, Rhythm, Race, Revolution. More about Aditi Alhalya Jaganathan

Image: Artwork by Sarah Al Sarraj for Kohl Journal’s upcoming issue Queer Futures, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.