Past Event
The Whitechapel Gallery is committed to making our events as accessible as possible for every audience member. Please contact access@whitechapelgallery.org if you would like to discuss a particular request and we will gladly discuss with you the best way to accommodate it.
Information about access on site at the gallery is available here: Whitechapel Gallery Access. This includes information about Lift access; Borrowing wheelchairs & seating; Assistance Animals; Parking; Toilets and baby care facilities; Blind & Partially Sighted Visitors; Subtitles and transcripts; British Sign Language (BSL) and hearing induction loops; Deaf Messaging Service (DMS).
This event takes place in our auditorium, with cushioned seats that have backs.
Transport
– To the best of our knowledge, there are no planned disruptions to local transport on the date of the event.
– Our nearest train station – Aldgate East Underground (1 min walk) is not wheelchair accessible. The closest wheelchair accessible stations are Whitechapel (15 min walk), Shoreditch High Street (15 min walk) or Liverpool Street (15 min walk).
– Free parking for Blue Badge holders is available at the top of Osborn Street in the pay and display booths for an unlimited period. Spaces are available on a first come, first served basis.
Thursday 17 Nov, 7pm | Zilka Auditorium | £5
In an evening of readings, Phoebe Boswell, Whitechapel Gallery’s Writer in Residence 2022, embraces the fluidity of language and storytelling as a means to unpack the cultural associations with which bodies of water are imbued. Sharing new writing based on research for recent and ongoing work, Boswell explores the relentless dichotomy of water. Layers of historic violence and trauma attest to how it continues to bear witness to an inequitable society, while its ebb and its flow, its surge and its swell, posit water as site for possible renewal, rebirth, reclamation – a healing, holding, place.
Throughout history and into the contemporary, bodies of water have carried a multiplicity of associations within the diasporic conscience. They are at once the markers of geopolitical boundary and the porous expanse between here and there – thresholds of non-citizenship. Water becomes archive for histories of trade, trafficking, forced migrations, fugitivity, subjugation, upheaval, violence, and refusal – while holding space for the radical imagination to propose something new. As locus of both hauntology and of hope, water holds within it and within us prophetic and remedial properties. We mourn and we float and we heal and we swim.
Phoebe Boswell‘s figurative and multidisciplinary practice denotes a commitment of care for how we see ourselves and each other. Underpinned by a porous, diasporic consciousness, she explores notions of inter/personal freedom, protest, grief, intimacy, migration, embodiment and world-making through the prism of race and gender, collective histories and possible futures.
Working intuitively across media, she centres drawing but spans animation, sound, video, writing, interactivity, performance and chorality to create layered, immersive installations which affect and are affected by the environments they occupy, by time, the serendipity of loops, and the presence of the audience.
