Friday 15 March 2024, 7pm
Please note that doors will open at 7pm for this event.
the87press and Cafe OTO present the latest in the "Mushaira" series in partnership with Norton Motorcycles. Each evening will embrace the fusion of music, poetry, and performance. Hailing from 17th Century South Asia, Mushairas were spaces where poetry was made, performed, and listened to. They continue today in a multitude of forms and ours is a 21st Century take on this traditional form. the87press first held their first Mushaira at the ICA in March 2022 and our mutual decision to re-launch that initiative at OTO has come through the continued support our collaboration has received from our wonderful community.
Kate Mascarenhas is an author based in Birmingham. She has a PhD in Literary Studies and Psychology, and is a chartered member of the British Psychological Society. Previously she has written for The Guardian, Observer Magazine, Big Issue North, and Mslexia. Her novels include The Psychology of Time Travel, The Thief on the Winged Horse, and most recently, Hokey Pokey.
Sara Crangle has edited the writings of Mina Loy and Anna Mendelssohn. She has just completed a two-volume Anatomy of Mina Loy (Edinburgh UP 2024) and in 2023, curated an exhibition of Mendelssohn's art with Whitechapel Gallery. Her poetry chapbook, Press & Release is forthcoming with Dancing Girl Press. Of late, her poems have appeared in Vestiges (2022) and the Earthbound Press poetry series (2020).
Iain Morrison is a poet, performer and programmer based in Edinburgh. His collection I’m a Pretty Circler was shortlisted for the Saltire Poetry Prize in 2019. He curated the poets-in-residence project Writers' Shift, writing alongside poets Janette Ayachi, Callie Gardner, Jane Goldman, and Tom Pow, and editing the resulting publication from Fruitmarket in 2022. His essay, 'Poems in Letters' about Callie Gardner's poetry, is forthcoming from the Scottish Literary Review in 2024. His events have included a night of drag queen poetry at the Scottish Poetry Library, and a week-long reading of Emily Dickinson’s complete works in a Berlin metro station. He trained as a musician and his practice moves between artforms, often ending up in a gallery.
Oscar Guardiola-Rivera is the author of two critically acclaimed books, What If Latin America Ruled the World?(Bloomsbury, 2010) winner of the Frantz Fanon Award, and Story of a Death Foretold (Bloomsbury, 2013) shortlisted for the 2014 Bread & Roses Award. More recently, In Defence of Armed/Art Struggle (Bogota: UTadeo, 2019), “A Future for the Philosophy of Liberation” in Decolonising Ethics (Pennsylvania University Press, 2020), and the poem Night of the World (The 87 Press, forthcoming 2021). Professor at the University of London. Fellow of the RSA.
Shirine Shah is a moving image artist and poet currently developing their practice at Conditions Studio Programme, Croydon. Their films have been screened in Iran, America, and Portugal. Their previous commissions include The Turner Contemporary and Vogue Fabrics. Ask them anything.
Co-creator of House of Victories, Matt Feldman is an artist and filmmaker living and working in Milwaukee. His practice often responds to specific geographies through installations that incorporate 16mm film, sculpture, and sound. By hybridising documentary, diary, and abstraction his works seeks to unpack the political and ecological concerns of particular landscapes.His works have been exhibited internationally at a variety of film festivals including Film Diary NYC at Millennium Film Workshop and CICLOPE at Cinema Sāo Jorge in Lisbon. His most recent exhibition Strange Phenomena, completed during his residency with Eastcheap Projects in Letchworth Garden City, investigates the town’s history as a hub for the Theosophical Society and their impact on the broader Garden City Movement.
House of Victories (2022, 16mm, 7 minutes) explores the local Islamic community of the writer and their musings into socialised identity and the abyss that bridges religion and the fallacy of language. Shot in various suburban areas of London and the wider UK, the film combines the natural and constructed realities of a hidden self. What begins as an abstract stream of consciousness exploring the slippages between language and gender transforms into a diaristic account of the writer’s return to their childhood mosque and the reconciliation of religion and spirituality. Explored through English voice and Urdu script, the cinematographic intention lies within esoteric truth, and the liberation that comes within not knowing.
Something Heavy Moved Upstairs (2023, mini DV, 7 minutes) is a film about a maddening toy and the poetics of masculinity, inheritance, and ritual.
Sound scientist, music archivist and song-singer, Andrew Ashong is guided by the immersive and transformative registers of recorded music. A Londoner by way of Ghana, the free-spirited Ashong spent years creating mixtapes, journeying through records and growing his musical encyclopaedia. By his early teens he was DJing, deepening his musical knowledge and understanding; eventually building an expansive home-studio and moving to the pulse of his creative inspiration. Cultivating a world of his own with a taste for polyrhythms, idiosyncratic basslines, modal chord progressions, and the ever-expanding palette of influences from Labi Siffre and Richie Havens, to War and Jorge Ben.
Forever a humble student of the dancefloor, Jwarn is inspired by music and its capacity for creating those magical moments. As a Subtle Radio resident and multi-genre label boss of Sub Merchants, Jwarn seamlessly navigates an array of bass-infused flavors, delivering the flows to wriggle your toes to.
Dorothy Cheung (b. 1987) is a filmmaker and artist from Hong Kong. Her practice explores the notion of identities and home through a double perspective. Her works are selected for film festivals including International Film Festival Rotterdam, Leeds International Film Festival, and Taiwan International Documentary Festival.
Heart Murmurs is a poetic dialogue between the filmmaker and Dean, a young man living in Hong Kong. In reflecting on his experience living with a congenital disability and HIV during the first years of the COVID pandemic, Dean expresses his sense of self in the face of regular medical challenges.
