Thu 21 Aug - Sun 21 Sep
For four weeks, the gallery is transformed into a semi-public artist studio and psychotherapy space where artist Linda Brogan and psychologist Adam Danquah are facilitating a journey of psycho-social exploration within a group of seven mixed-heritage cultural practitioners based in Manchester. Together this intergenerational group excavates personal stories, lay truths bare, and forge pathways forward in solidarity.
Based on each participant's unique story, Brogan is filling the gallery space with sixteen large-scale drawings using a method of mind-mapping she first developed as a personal therapeutic tool in the early 2000s. This unfolding, unruly forest of lived experience forms a powerful basis for reflection and integration, also creating the setting for the culmination of the group's journey in a self-devised embodied grief ritual.
MY MUM IS WHITE is a collective experiment bridging community building, psychotherapy, and visual art. It is a collective reckoning and a public call to acknowledge the nuances of experiences at the intersections of racial identity.
The studio is a reflective and creative space designed to be a container for dialogue and healing. When not in use for private sessions, the public are invited to witness Brogan at work and use the space for their own reflections and conversations.
*The term 'half-caste' is used in full recognition of its origins in colonialism and the system of chattel slavery, and in recognition of its eventual use as a self-descriptor in Britain. Brogan and Danquah use the term 'half-caste' to signify their shared experience growing up.
MY MUM IS WHITE is a project by Linda Brogan and Adam Danquah with curatorial input by Hannah Vollam. Produced by Clarissa Corfe (Creative Producer: Visual Art, HOME). Generously supported by Arts Council England.
More about the exhibition:
Linda Brogan says:
HOME's former artistic director, Dave Moutrey suggests I read Isabel Wilkerson's book Caste: The Origins of our Discontents. HOME is showing Origin, the film based on the book. I watch; I read. My eyes are opened. Half-caste* is just something me and people of my generation were known as.
Wilkerson unearths that caste is 3000 years old. Brahmins worship God. Dalits shovel shit. Jim Crow adopts it. Public white sinks are generous. Black sinks barely hold to the wall. Wilkerson collates the techniques both regimes use into eight pillars that uphold caste. I ask Adam to read Caste.
Adam introduces me to Fraiberg: Ghosts in the Nursery. ‘In every nursery there are ghosts. Visitors from the unremembered past of the parents.’ The Eight Pillars of Caste’ enter a half-caste nursery.
1. Divine Will and Laws of Nature.
2. Heritability.
3. Endogamy and the Control of Marriage and Mating.
4. Purity versus Pollution.
5. Occupational Hierarchy.
6. Dehumanisation and Stigma.
7. Terror as Enforcement, Cruelty as a Means of Control.
8. Inherent Superiority versus Inherent Inferiority
Both texts butter pats us. Referencing segregated sinks, I will employ my 12-word writing technique to ask eight mixed-race cultural practitioners: 'What does a half-caste sink look like? Releasing eight memoirs. I transform into eight 8-station mind-maps. Adam helps us unpack. I transform into a further eight 8-station mind-maps. Suspended. A forest of ghosts. We exorcise in an embodied grief ritual, the group devises - midnight during the waning crescent moon of reflection and renewal.
MY MUM IS WHITE is a project by Linda Brogan and Adam Danquah with curatorial input by Hannah Vollam. Produced by Clarissa Corfe (Creative Producer: Visual Art, HOME). Generously supported by Arts Council England.
Collage of images created by Linda Brogan, incorporating a photograph of Jim Crow era segregated sinks by Elliott Erwitt (c.1950) from the collections of the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution (CC0/Public Domain).
