A photo of a hand reaching out to touch a red flower bud in a sea of greenery. The image is portrait and either side of it are two black rectangles.
Workshop
Somerset House Studios

Grounding Practice: Shama Khanna / Flatness

Fri 04 Mar
18.00 - 19.30 (GMT)
Online

An online workshop led by curator and Flatness founder Shama Khanna.

During this Grounding Practice session, the group will discuss key political questions of embodiment and disembodiment in relation to digital expression and communication. Flatness values this critical cultural moment following the social justice uprisings during the pandemic when we are stepping out from behind our screens and demanding the safe circulation of our fantasies honed there, asking: what spaces beyond social media nourish these practices free from these platforms’ sidelines in hate and extraction? 

This workshop will appeal to those with an active interest in achieving in social justice and alternative forms of encountering art online to the main social media channels and institutional platforms. 
 
This Grounding Practice workshop has been programmed in conjunction Amplify Digital Arts Initiative (DAI) 2022, an online residency programme bringing together an international network of female-identifying and non-binary artists and professionals working within the fields of digital arts and electronic music, produced in partnership with British Council, MUTEK, Oi Futuro and Artlab. 
 
The session is made available free of charge for Amplify DAI artists as part of their residency programme activity, with a limited number of additional tickets available for purchase by female-identifying and non-binary artists and professionals outside of the residency cohort. 

About Flatness

Flatness is a long-running platform for artists’ moving image and network culture founded by Shama Khanna in 2013. Through working with devalued forms of the copy, outmoded technology and the web, and closely collaborating with overlooked practices; Flatness has been described by Dr Sylvia Theuri as a ‘digital site of resistance’ decentering hegemonic narratives of the arts and normalcy from the margins of the online. Flatness presents a porous context for artworks to be shared as part of a genuinely networked culture.  

The project has shifted over time to respond to the rapidly changing political and environmental context. The upcoming Flatness book, entitled 'Queer Diasporic Futurity', proposes that a sense of futurity (entangled with the past and the present – Saidiya Hartman), inextricably linked with praxes of sustainability, visibility, and pleasure, is a condition of participation by many QTIPOC (Queer Trans Intersex identified People of Colour) in the arts and beyond. The project emphasises the importance of self-care, creativity and interdependence within wider activist contexts in challenging social and environmental injustice.