JULY 2 @ 19:00 – 21:00

A discussion about the cultural, social and political dimensions of women’s homelessness and the role of artists in challenging it. With Dr Janna Graham, Bekki Perriman and Shiri Shalmy.

How much do we know about the trials of life for the growing number of women forced to live on our streets, in hostels or in homeless shelters? Their presence is not just a personal tragedy, but a social and political act of violence and injustice.

To mark the publication of DOORWAYS: WOMEN, HOMELESSNESS, TRAUMA AND RESISTANCE by House Sparrow Press, this event brings together artists and activists to discuss the crisis of women’s homelessness.

As the effects of capitalism and relentless property speculation blight and restrict the lives of millions, Doorways delivers an urgent and uncompromising dispatch on the realities of austerity, gendered violence and social cleansing in Britain today.

Growing out of the extreme personal experience that informed the sound and photographic works of artist Bekki Perriman’s The Doorways Project, at the core of the book are interviews with one of society’s most marginalised groups — women experiencing street homelessness.

For this event, artists and activists Janna Graham, Bekki Perriman and Shiri Shalmy will be in conversation, exploring the cultural, social and political dimensions of homelessness, as well as the role of artists and institutions in challenging it.

Dr Janna Graham is an organiser, educator and writer committed to practices of radical pedagogy, listening and research. For many years she worked in art galleries as a curator developing projects with communities in struggle around issues of colonialism, racism and the inequalities of urban development. From 2009–14, with Amal Khalaf and others she ran the Centre for Possible Studies, an artist residency and popular education and research centre in London’s Edgware Road neighbourhood, supported by the Serpentine Gallery. She is currently a lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, a member of the international sound art and political collective Ultra-red and part of the Precarious Workers Brigade.

Bekki Perriman is an artist interested in creating work around homelessness and mental health. The Doorways Project was commissioned by Unlimited (2016) and is a touring site-specific sound installation exploring homeless culture. Inspired by her experience of life on the streets, Bekki’s direct and unsentimental approach investigates the personal, social and political dimensions of homelessness. Through a series of recorded monologues, audiences were invited to intimately engage with the difficult (and mostly ignored) experience of homelessness, and hear first hand the challenges
it presents.

Shiri Shalmy is a cultural worker and organiser. Over the years she has curated and produced a large number of public art exhibitions and projects, as well as work around radical education and organised labour. She is particularly interested in developing autonomous, self-organised structures around class politics and in movement building through direct action. She is a co-founder of Antiuniversity Now and an organiser with the grassroots campaigning trade union United Voices of the World.