Translating Dreams + Nightmares

Panel with Sukhdev Sandhu, Parvati Raghuram, Alia Syed, Sandhya Suri, Antoinette Brown, Nirmal Puwar (Chair)

Sukhdev Sandhu - is the author of Night Haunts: A Journey Through The London Night (winner of 2008 DH Lawrence International Prize For Travel Writing). He makes radio documentaries for the BBC, runs the Colloquium for Unpopular Culture at New York University, and is a film critic (he was named Critic of the Year at the British Press Awards in 2005). His writings have appeared in a number of publications including the London Review of Books, Suddeutsche Zeitung, Du, The Wire, Sight and Sound, Bidoun, Gastronomica, The Australian, Modernism/ Modernity, New York, The Guardian, Times Literary Supplement.

Sandhya Suri - is the director of I is For India, a film memoir based on years of transnational cine film letters exchanged between her father in India and his parental home in India during a long duration of separation. She has worked on a wide range of international and local NGOs before running the Film Unit at Oxfam GB for three years. Suri has a strong interest in participatory film.

Parvati Raghuram - is Director of the OpenSpace Research Centre. Her books include Gendered migration and global social reproduction with Kofman, E (2015). She has co-authored Gender and International Migration in Europe (2000) and The Practice of Cultural Studies (2004) and co-edited Tracing Indian Diasporas: Contexts, Memories, Representations (2008) & South Asian Women in the Diaspora (2003, with N. Puwar).

Antoinette Brown’s art work fills the exhibition space of Migrating Dreams + Nightmares at Goldsmiths. Previously she worked with the Methods Lab on the AHRC project Noise of the Past and Cinema III. She works predominantly in the medium of painting and sculpture, but has worked on large scale installations. Her work is concerned with the cyclical nature of time often with focus on the points of intersection between painting, sculpture, and spatial analysis. She has recently had work exhibited with The Well Made Project, London and The Art of Caring Project in association with Kingston University.

Alia Syed is an artistic film maker. She has collaborated with the Methods Lab for Migrating Dreams + Nightmares by installing her new film On a Wing and a Prayer film on the shelves of the Stuart Hall Library. The film is inspired by the story of Abdul Rahman Haroun, who walked through the channel tunnel. Syed’s films have been shown internationally, including BBC Arts Online; The Triangle Space; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; 5th Moscow Biennale; Museum of Modern Art; Museo National Centro de Arte Reina Sofia; XV Sydney Biennale; Hayward Gallery; Tate Britain; and Tate Modern, London.

A drinks reception will be held after the panel

This event is part of the Migrating Dreams and Nightmares project (Oct 15 - Apr 16), organised by the Methods Lab, Goldsmiths.

Migrating Dreams and Nightmares takes its conceptual and methodological inspiration from John Berger and Jean Mohr's classic A Seventh Man (1975).

EXHIBITION Words and images from A Seventh Man, which was translated into different languages, have been re-enacted in the Kingsway Corridor by the artist Antoinette Brown, in collaboration with Nirmal Puwar. Chalk, blackboards and wire jolt the words out of the book and onto the walls of the academy. Contemporary graffiti from Larache’s harbour sits amongst selections from the book. In addition, Sadek Rahim’s sponge boats from his project No Crash! Boom! Bang!, originally installed in the Bibliothèque Nationale d'Alger, hang in the arches of the passageway. In a linked-in off-site exhibition in the Stuart Hall Library Alia Syed and Nadia Perrotta have responded to Berger and Mohr’s book and Syed’s longstanding interest in tunnels to examine the hopes and fears driving the movements of current migrants and refugees.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS With grateful thanks to the people without whom this project would not have materialised. To the artists: Antoinette Brown, Sadek Rahim, Alia Syed. To those who helped with the translations: Imran Ayata and Manuela Bojadzijev, Amarjit Chandan, Gilles Fage (Fage éditions and Nouvelles éditions Scala), Duran Kim (Duran Kim agency) and Teresa Pintó (Agencia Literaria). Thanks also to Nick Brown (Stuart Hall Library), to Di Robson and Gareth Evans (Artevents) for their loan of Mohr's photographs, and to Jean Mohr and John Berger for granting us the liberty to re-shuffle the text and images. Thanks to the Sociology Department, the Research Office at Goldsmiths, the Women's Art Library and the journal Sociological Review for financing the project.

Translating Dreams + Nightmares (Panel & Drinks)