Past Events

Difference and Togetherness: Art and Britishness in Wolverhampton

Lecture – Gaika Tavares, Romalyn Ante

  • 1 April 2022
  • 1:00 – 2:00 pm
  • British Art Show 9 (BAS9) is collaborating with the Paul Mellon Centre to organise a performance on the occasion of it being held in Wolverhampton.
  • Location: Wolverhampton School of Art

British Art Show 9 in Wolverhampton looks at how we live with and give voice to difference, featuring artists that explore identity, looking at how it is negotiated, and the factors that construct it, such as class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and politics.
A performance in conversation with the exhibition will take place Friday 01 April at 13.00 with an activation of ZEMEL by artist GAIKA and author Romalyn Ante.

The performance and exhibition are free and un-ticketed.

An accompanying panel has been cancelled due to Covid.

About the speakers

  • A self-described “hard-to-place person”, GAIKA is an experimental music producer, writer, visual and performance artist. His debut album, Basic Volume, and his first art installation, SYSTEM, a vast experiential audio-visual sculpture, were launched simultaneously in 2018. Both projects draw directly on his Caribbean heritage. While Basic Volume is an elegy to GAIKA’s late father, a Windrush-generation immigrant, SYSTEM marked the seventieth anniversary of Windrush by exploring the impact of migration on music in the UK, sound system culture and the history of the Notting Hill Carnival. GAIKA’s new installation, ZEMEL (2022), is a smaller-scale relative of SYSTEM, and is a shrine to Black heroism. GAIKA (born 1982, London) lives and works in London.

  • Romalyn Ante is a Filipino-British, Wolverhampton-based author. She is co-founding editor of harana poetry, a magazine for poets who write in English as a second or parallel language, and founder of Tsaá with Roma, an online interview series with poets and other creatives. Her debut collection is Antiemetic for Homesickness (Chatto & Windus). She was recently awarded one of the Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowships 2021/22.