Harun Morrison

September – November 2025
Open School East + Online

Alongside the research group with Hugh Nicholson, artist and researcher Harun Morrison led a critically focused reading group with the Associates, exploring different forms of water and liquidity as ways of thinking about ourselves, and how we formulate ideas, histories and forms of organising.

The reading group opened with an introductory talk by Harun, followed by a participatory workshop based around Environmental Justice Questions—an evolving compilation of questions organised and edited by Harun, and developed through conversations with activists, writers, artworkers, theorists, architects, chefs, natural historians and horticulturalists. The questions, which address different aspects of environmental justice, provided a starting point for collective discussion and reflection.

Across four sessions, the group read a series of texts that approached water and liquidity as both material and conceptual frameworks. These included sections from Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation and Elizabeth DeLoughrey’s Revisiting Tidalectics: Irma/José/Maria 2017; Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals; Robert Preston-Whyte’s The Beach as a Liminal Space; Claire Marie Healy’s Girlhood Studies: Debunking the Myth of the Idyllic Beach in Cinema; and Ingrid Vranken, Sepideh Ardalani and Mihaela Brebenel’s Thinking-with the Swamp.

Together, the sessions offered space to consider water, beaches, seas and swamps as sites through which histories, relationships, identities and forms of collective organisation might be rethought.

Harun Morrison is an artist and writer based in London and an associate artist with Greenpeace UK on the project Bad Taste. He recently presented work in the group show, SOIL: The World at Our Feet. In 2024, he was in the two person show, DONO, at Somerset House Studios project space G31 alongside Appau Jnr Boakye-Yiadom and the solo show Conjunction at VOLT, Devonshire Collective in Eastbourne. His forthcoming novel, The Escape Artist will be published by Book Works in 2025. 

Recent group exhibitions include Sonic Acts 2024: The Spell of The Sensuous, Amsterdam, Chronic Hunger / Chronic Desire in Timișoara, Romania, BALATORIUM Disturbed Waters, in Veszprém, Hungary as part of the European Capital of Culture 2023 programme and Bamako Biennial, 2020 in Mali. Harun is an associate researcher at Goldsmiths University, London and part of the Art and Ecology Research Centre. He is also part of the faculty of the Dutch Art Institute, MA Art Praxis and Conditions in Croydon, London.

These sessions are part of OSE’s two-year thematic cycle Home is where the garden is – find more events: openschooleast.org/home-is-associates