Exhibition Description

The exhibition projects culture, language, and events from what has been considered the "fringes" of the world, and brings them into dialogue with the cosmopolitan centre, albeit with a minor note that has the potential of unravelling the centrality of the centre itself. The digital paintings, sketches and writings, along with photographs, focusing on the life, belief-systems, and bhakti-sufi culture of North India centred around the river 'ghats' and sufi shrines, bring out the fragmented realities across the world into a temporary whole that is stitched together into a minor cosmopolitan framework. The exhibition features original digital artworks, sketches, writings, and art panels from our graphic novel, "Travelling Through Tilisms: A Surrealist Travelogue".

Bios of Curators

Mainak Mitra is a multidisciplinary visual artist who creates Illustrations, animation and comics. After graduation from the Faculty of Fine Arts, Baroda and surviving the pandemic during his Animation degree from IDC, IIT Bombay, Mainak decided to invest his time creating comics. His home is originally from the tropical delta of bengal, but his roots are spread all over the subcontinent. He loves  rain, railways, meeting strangers, watching films and finding wildlife.

Abiral Kumar is a PhD Fellow at RTG minor cosmopolitanisms. His research work interrogates world literature and cosmopolitanism theory through oral literary practices and notions of alien identities. He is a published graphic novelist. His short graphic narratives based on the 16th c. Hamzanama tradition, Fragrance of Time and Perchance to dream have been awarded by the Barzinji Foundation, USA.

The panel will open with a screening of the award-winning short documentary Queer Exile. The film follows our panellist Ahmed Awadalla, an activist who flees Egypt after the 2011 revolution and seeks refuge in Berlin. Expecting safety and freedom, they instead find themselves in a refugee camp, confronted by far-right hostility and the complexities of exile. Caught between longing for the past and the challenges of their new home, they grapple with fundamental questions of belonging, sacrifice, and the meaning of freedom.   

Bios of Panellists and Speakers

Ahmed Awadalla

Ahmed Awadalla is a writer, historian, and transdisciplinary artist whose work reimagines knowledge production through queer and decolonial methodologies. Awadalla has contributed to critical conversations on colonial history, public health, sexual politics, diaspora, and exile, with writing published across media and academic platforms. Their award-winning documentary short Queer Exile has been showcased at esteemed film festivals worldwide.

Francesca Schmidt

Francesca Schmidt works from a decolonial perspective on questions of artificial intelligence, algorithms and their socio-normative implications, surveillance and control, and digital violence. She has sharpened the focus on feminist net politics at the Gunda Werner Institute for Feminism and Gender Democracy and currently works as a consultant at the Federal Agency for Civic Education for intersectional memory and transformational knowledge with a concentration on the decolonisation of the digital, feminist net politics, technoheritage, decolonial memory. Her book Netzpolitik. Eine feministische Einführung was published by Barbara Budrich Publishers in 2020. She is a founding member and board member of Netzforma* e.V. - Verein für feministische Netzpolitik.

Nuno Ferreira

Nuno joined the University of Sussex as a Professor of Law in 2016. Previously, he was a Senior Lecturer at the University of Liverpool (2012-2016) and Lecturer at the University of Manchester (2006-2012). He has also been a Visiting Professor at Wuhan University (China) and the School of Law of the University of Lisbon (Portugal), as well as a guest scholar at the University of Girona (Spain) and the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law (Sweden).

Nuno did his undergraduate law studies at the University of Coimbra (Portugal) and University of Bologna (Italy), and is a member of the Portuguese Bar. He worked as a legal consultant at the Legal Affairs and Litigation Department of the Portuguese Securities Market Commission (CMVM), and as a research fellow at the Centre of European Law and Politics at the University of Bremen (ZERP) (Germany). He carried out his doctoral studies at the University of Bremen, where he obtained his Dr. jur. title (summa cum laude).

Nuno has been a Horizon 2020 ERC Starting Grant recipient, leading the project SOGICA - Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Claims of Asylum (2016-2020, www.sogica.org), and the Sussex lead in the project TRAFIG - Transnational Figurations of Displacement (2019-2022, www.trafig.eu). He is currently the principal investigator in the project NQIfFM - Negotiating Queer Identities Following Forced Migration (2022-2024, iranqueerefugee.net/), and co-editor of the Queer Judgments Project (https://www.queerjudgments.org/).

Ali N. Tutar (he/they) 

Founder and Coordinator of Queeraspora e.V.  (queer migrant association in Germany) and Counsellor for Empowerment and Antidiscrimination within the Queer Migrant Community in Bremen.

Bios of Organizers and Moderators

Dr CQ Quinan’s expertise lies in the fields of trans studies and queer theory, with a particular focus on examining how anxieties around nationality and racial difference come to be transposed onto queer, trans and gender diverse bodies and subjectivities. Their first book is entitled Hybrid Anxieties: Queering the French-Algerian War and its Postcolonial Legacies (University of Nebraska Press, 2020), and their second monograph, entitled The Borders of Gender: Recognition, Representation, Resistance, is in progress. They are a Senior Lecturer in Gender Studies at the University of Melbourne.

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Claude Kempen is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Melbourne and Potsdam, focusing on contemporary nonbinary memoirs, with the aim of developing a Nonbinary Theory. Their previous work has examined Islamophobia in pornography (ZMO Working Papers, 2020) and medical gatekeeping in German trans healthcare (Routledge, forthcoming).

Instagram: @claudekempen

Website: https://arts.unimelb.edu.au/school-of-culture-and-communication/graduate-researchers/profiles/claude-kempen

Bios of Participants

Mario Lewis is an artist who lives and works on the island of Trinidad and Tobago. His work involves collaborative and participatory research and focuses on product development specific for agricultural sustainability. This includes working hand-in-hand with soil and climate scientists, networks of farming practitioners and creative thinkers in developing projects and pilots that focus on zero-waste, carbon sequestration, and agroforestry. Mario integrates contemporary art making into his research such as drawing, sound, video and site-specific installation, exploring and experimenting with concepts inspired by nature, science and personal encounters.

Credit photo: Abigail Hadeed, 2023

Saskia Köbschall is a curator and anthropologist. Her work combines research, curatorial practice, and collaborative projects with a focus on colonial continuities, particularly in concepts of nature, environment, and the body. From 2020 to 2024, she was the co-founder and co-director of Nyabinghi Lab. She was also the co-artistic director of the project The Roots of Our Hands Run Deep as Revolt: Entangled Colonialities of the Green. Previously, she was a manager and member of the curatorial team at SAVVY Contemporary. Saskia Köbschall studied Anthropology at The New School for Social Research in New York City and has been a PhD candidate since 2019 at the DFG Research Training Group Minor Cosmopolitanisms at the University of Potsdam, where she researches the colonial-racist origins of nudism/naturism and the environmental movement

Aouefa Amoussouvi (she/her) is a French-Beninese multidisciplinary researcher, curator and artist based in Berlin. She holds a PhD in Theoretical Molecular Biophysics from Berlin Humboldt University (2019). Her work explores rituals, technologies, intersectional and decolonial feminist narratives in science and art. She aims to create alternative practices for collective knowledge production on digital colonialism, ecology, menstruation, food, or the body-mind relationship, among other topics. She also investigates technologies for healing and maintenance of transgenerational memories and is trained in process-oriented psychology. She produces lecture-performances, workshops, podcasts, exhibitions and publications. She was co-director of the Berlin art-space „The Institute for Endotic Research“ (TIER) in 2021-2022. She has worked with SAVVY Contemporary, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Maxim Gorki Theater, Royal Holloway University of London, Laboratoire Kontempo, Disruption Lab, Neun Kelche, Tworks Singapore, Art Laboratory Berlin, Nyabinghi Lab among others.

Credit photo A. Amoussouvi: Barnabás Neogrády-Kiss

Duduetsang Lamola and Mishca Peters are producer and researcher, respectively, of the Chimurenga collective. Chimurenga is a pan African platform of writing, art and politics founded by Ntone Edjabe in 2002. Drawing together a myriad voices from across Africa and the diaspora, Chimurenga takes many forms operating as an innovative platform for free ideas and political reflection about Africa by Africans. Outputs include a journal of culture, art and politics of the same name (Chimurenga Magazine); a quarterly broadsheet called The Chronic; the Chimurenga Library – an ongoing invention into knowledge production and the archive that seeks to re-imagine the library; the African Cities Reader – a biennial publication of urban life, Africa-style; and the Pan African Space Station (PASS) – an online radio station and pop-up studio. 

Bios of Panellists and Speakers

Satish Poduval is Professor of Cultural Studies at the English and Foreign Languages University in Hyderabad, India. His research interests include film and media studies, contemporary Indian literature, and critical theory. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Potsdam, where he is also currently DAAD’s Postcolonial Chair in Global Modernities. He has edited Re-Figuring Culture: History, Theory and the Aesthetic in Contemporary India, and is part of the editorial team of maidaanam.org and indiancine.ma

Madhumeeta Sinha teaches in the School of English Language Education at the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad (India). Her research interests include multilingual education, learner-centred classrooms, and feminist media studies. She has been guest faculty at the Technical University of Dresden and the Munich University of Applied Sciences. She has co-edited a broadsheet on Sexuality and Harassment: Gender Politics on Campus Today and has published several essays on education, gender and documentary cinema in India.

Florian Schybilski is project coordinator of the research training group 'minor cosmopolitanisms' and the research unit 'Collaborations' at the Institute for English and American Studies at the University of Potsdam. Florian wrote his PhD dissertation on the theme of democracy in India with a focus on the democratizing initiatives in anti-caste activism, which informs his intersectional approach to caste, class, race and gender.

Yogesh Maitreya is a writer, a publisher and a campaigner for social democracy. He runs Panther’s Paw Publications (PPP) from the city of Nagpur, which drives the pro-democratic movement spearheaded by Dalits. His memoir Water in a Broken Pot has been published by Penguin in 2023 and the first German translation of his short story collection Flowers on the Grave of Caste has come last year as Blumen auf dem Grab der Kaste. Currently, Yogesh is on a tour of Germany as part of which he will return to Berlin for the literature fair MissRead in June to bring the works of caste-oppressed writers to audiences in Germany.

Bio of co-facilitator Nuno Ferreira

Nuno joined the University of Sussex as a Professor of Law in 2016. Previously, he was a Senior Lecturer at the University of Liverpool (2012-2016) and Lecturer at the University of Manchester (2006-2012). He has also been a Visiting Professor at Wuhan University (China) and the School of Law of the University of Lisbon (Portugal), as well as a guest scholar at the University of Girona (Spain) and the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law (Sweden).

Nuno did his undergraduate law studies at the University of Coimbra (Portugal) and University of Bologna (Italy), and is a member of the Portuguese Bar. He worked as a legal consultant at the Legal Affairs and Litigation Department of the Portuguese Securities Market Commission (CMVM), and as a research fellow at the Centre of European Law and Politics at the University of Bremen (ZERP) (Germany). He carried out his doctoral studies at the University of Bremen, where he obtained his Dr. jur. title (summa cum laude).

Nuno has been a Horizon 2020 ERC Starting Grant recipient, leading the project SOGICA - Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Claims of Asylum (2016-2020, www.sogica.org), and the Sussex lead in the project TRAFIG - Transnational Figurations of Displacement (2019-2022, www.trafig.eu). He is currently the principal investigator in the project NQIfFM - Negotiating Queer Identities Following Forced Migration (2022-2024, iranqueerefugee.net/), and co-editor of the Queer Judgments Project (https://www.queerjudgments.org/).

Event Description

This listening session is conceived as a living musically oriented space co-ordinated by Prof. Marcus Boon and researcher Abiral Kumar where the participants and the audience take part in improvising a shared aural experience. The organisers will begin by sharing a track of their choice and invite other participants to play tracks in turn, related to the theme and history of the idea of "minor cosmopolitanisms", with an emphasis on the many meanings of the word "minor", including musical ones. The participants and the audience are invited to share their experience of listening to the music. The session will be open to the audience, who will be invited to share tracks of their choice, responding to the other selections and participating in the sonic improvisation. In bringing together songs, music, and memories, the listening session explores the human and non-human connection between speech and music where both are alive and affect each other in myriad ways.

Bios of the Organizers

Marcus Boon is Professor of English at York University in Toronto, where he teaches contemporary literature and cultural theory. He is the author of several books including, most recently, The Politics of Vibration: Music as a Cosmopolitical Practice. He co-edited the Whitechapel Documents of Contemporary Arts reader on Practice with Gabriel Levine, and is currently working on a book about wave cultures with Christie Pearson.

Abiral Kumar is a PhD Fellow at RTG minor cosmopolitanisms. His research work interrogates world literature and cosmopolitanism theory through oral literary practices and notions of alien identities. He is a published graphic novelist. His short graphic narratives based on the 16th c. Hamzanama tradition, Fragrance of Time and Perchance to dream have been awarded by the Barzinji Foundation, USA.

Event Description

The event brings together a docufilm screening "Tilism-e Jahāñ: Fragment from an unfinished film" followed by a discussion on the graphic novel: Travelling Through Tilisms by Abiral Kumar and Mainak Mitra, on the theme of tilism (magical worlds) and travel (through real places). The documentary film features stories and evidences of a long lost oral storytelling traditions whose traces still remain amongst the folk narratives, oral histories, religious philosophy, and in “magical” practices in north India. The graphic novel follows up on the documentary as a record of sights, tellings, and experiences of the writer-artist duo that emphasise the entanglements of lived “reality” with “unreal” tales, and events that shapes the daily lives of the people of north India. The artist conversation following the film will unpack the stories and experiences of moving between the worlds.

Bios of the Speakers

Sarnath Banerjee, born in Kolkata in 1972, is an Indian graphic novelist, illustrator and publisher. After studying visual communication at Goldsmiths College in London, he published his first book, Corridor, in 2004. It is considered one of the first Indian graphic novels and brought the artist, who now lives in Berlin, international recognition.

Mainak Mitra is a multidisciplinary visual artist who creates Illustrations, animation and comics. After graduation from the Faculty of Fine Arts, Baroda and surviving the pandemic during his Animation degree from IDC, IIT Bombay, Mainak decided to invest his time creating comics. His home is originally from the tropical delta of bengal, but his roots are spread all over the subcontinent. He loves  rain, railways, meeting strangers, watching films and finding wildlife.

Priyam Goswami Choudhury is a postdoctoral researcher working on the colonial legacies of tea at Uni Potsdam.

Abiral Kumar is a PhD Fellow at RTG minor cosmopolitanisms. His research work interrogates world literature and cosmopolitanism theory through oral literary practices and notions of alien identities. He is a published graphic novelist. His short graphic narratives based on the 16th c. Hamzanama tradition, Fragrance of Time and Perchance to dream have been awarded by the Barzinji Foundation, USA.

Bios of Speakers

Neela Janssen studied Cultural History and Theory at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and at the University of Toronto. Her PhD project on the question of failing men takes on narratives of decay inherent in fiction and their close connection to literary and cultural negotiations of bourgeois masculinity. Since October 2024, she is a junior fellow at ifk in Vienna.

Andreas Gehrlach is the program director of the International Research Center for Cultural Studies (ifk) in Vienna. Since completing his habilitation on the cultural, literary and body history of kneeling, he is now looking forward to tackling new research projects on the political history of swamps or on the cultural technique of getting lost. 

Stephan Zandt is a post-doctoral researcher in the DFG Research Training Group Media Anthropology at the Bauhaus-University Weimar. He studied Cultural Studies and Comparative Cultural and Religious Studies. His research interests include media anthropologies, politics of childhood, cultural history and anthropology of the senses, aesthetics and human-animal studies.

Bios of Panellists and Speakers

Tony Birch is the Chair of Australian Literature in the School of Communication at Melbourne University. He is also a Fitzroy Blak, a historian, poet and novelist.

Keith L. Camacho is a Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is also a Mercator Fellow at the Research Training Group Minor Cosmopolitanisms at the University of Potsdam. His research publications mainly examine histories of gender, indigeneity, militarization, and resistance in twentieth-century Oceania. 

Brigalow McIntosh is a Muruwari & Kooma academic from Australia. He is currently a PhD student at the University of Potsdam in the Research-Collaborations Unit. He has a background in Aboriginal child and family welfare policy and holds a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) from the University of Melbourne.

Hereata Pereyre is an islander from French Polynesia (Tahiti), born and raised. She completed a bachelor's degree in Tahiti before pursuing a master's in French and Comparative Literature. Her passion for Oceanian literature grew during her master’s research on the deconstruction of colonial myths in contemporary island writing.

Tamatoa Tepuhiarii is a Māòhi (indigenous from Māòhi Nui/French Polynesia) research associate and PhD student at the University of Hamburg, Institute of Geography, Germany, working on the project 'Nuclear Justice and Gender in the South Pacific'. He is a strong advocate against nuclear weapons testing and has represented his country in local, regional and international discussions.