Thur 21 Aug - Sun 21 Sep
For four weeks, our main gallery will be transformed into a semi-public artist studio and psychotherapy space where artist Linda Brogan and psychologist Adam Danquah will facilitate a journey of psycho-social exploration with a group of eight mixed-heritage cultural practitioners based in Manchester. Together this intergenerational group will excavate personal stories, lay truths bare, and forge pathways forward in solidarity.
Based on each participant's unique story, Brogan will fill the gallery walls 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 will form 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. A programme of public workshops led by Brogan and Danquah will run parallel to the private group sessions. Further details will be announced on our website soon.
*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 Corge (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 real 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 8 pillars that uphold caste. I ask Adam to read Caste.
Adam introduces me to Frailberg: Ghosts in the Nursery. 'In every nursery there are ghosts. Visitors from the unrememberd past of the parents.' Specific ghosts enter a 'half-caste' nursery. 1940s GIs. 1950s Windrush. 1960s Civil Rights. 1970 Black Power. 1980 Riots. 2020: George Floyd; BLM. Both texts butter pats us through our eight x 2hrs meetings and three months of grant applications.
Referencing segregated sinks, I will employ my 12-word writing technique to ask eight mixed-race cultural pracitioners: '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. Drawn directly onto HOME walls. A forest of ghosts. We exorcise in an embodied grief ritual, the group devises, during the waning crescent moon or reflection and renewal.
