Upgrade Yourself Monthly: Questioning, Collaboration and Creative Practice
Join us for our December Upgrade Yourself Monthly with Somerset House Studios artist Jemma Desai to explore new thinking around access, peer support, resources and co-authorship.
For 18-30 year olds
| Dates | Wed 2 Dec 2026 |
| Times | 6–9pm |
| Space | River Rooms New Wing |
| Price | Free |
Please note this event is for 18–30-year-olds.
Drawing on her practice across film, writing, performance, group work, facilitation and organising, Jemma will share how returning to familiar materials and processes, asking questions without easy answers and connecting between different art forms can change what we see and imagine as possible, particularly within systems and ways of working that appear fixed or immovable.
For part of the evening, Jemma will be joined by artist and designer Rose Nordin to reflect on their recent collaboration as part of Jemma's exhibition There Are No Honest Poems About Dead Women. Together, they'll explore how their working relationship developed, how their different practices shaped the work, and what it means to support and accompany someone else's creative process.
Through this conversation and playful workshop activities spanning movement, writing, collage, and more, we'll explore questions such as:
- What questions can we not stop asking of ourselves and our work? What questions are we stopped from asking?
- What happens when we notice, arrange and rearrange familiar ideas, materials and ways of working?
- How might we work with and support one another differently? What makes this possible, and what gets in the way?
- What might we want to question or change in our own creative practices?
As always, free drinks and food provided by Butch Salads will be available throughout the evening.
✨ And here’s the bonus:
All attendees will receive a free ticket to SKATE at Somerset House – one of London’s most iconic winter experiences. Glide across the ice in a stunning cultural setting, surrounded by music, lights, and the magic of the season.
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About Jemma Desai
Jemma Desai is a writer, convener and artist working across film, performance and visual arts. Through video, poetry, performance writing and collage, her practice explores forms of gathering, assemblage and circulation: of voices, bodies, images, ideas and ways of knowing across difference. Drawing on decolonial, black feminist and abolitionist thought, she is interested in artistic form as both an aesthetic and embodied social practice, and in the conditions through which culture is made, shared and received. These questions underpin her practice-based doctoral research, which explores abolitionist praxis as form and infrastructure in cultural production.
Rose Nordin
Rose Nordin is a British–Malay artist and book designer from London. She is currently participating artist in residence at Auto Italia, Fellow at the Centre for Art and Design Research and engaged in the British Council Connections Through Culture initiative with the Malaysian Design Archive Her practice engages with the publication or the book as an object of knowledge production, ritual technology and expanded material of exhibition. Previous commissioners and residency hosts include: Somerset House Studios (UK), Jan Van Eyke Academie (Netherlands) Documenta 15 (Germany), Art Night (UK), Serpentine Galleries (UK), Portland Institute of Contemporary Art (USA) and Tai Kwan Contemporary (Hong Kong) . Rose was previously research associate at iniva (UK), Social Practice Fellow at the University of Chicago (USA) and associate lecturer at the University of Arts London.
with thanks to The Linbury Trust