Academic Tour | Khudejha Asghar

Khudejha Asghar is a Research Fellow, studying mechanisms for interrupting the intergenerational transmission of violence. With over ten years of experience on preventing and responding to violence against women, children and people of diverse sexual orientation, gender identity and expression in different parts of the world, she will look at our exhibitions through the lens of emotional trauma. As trauma tends to fragment experience, we will move between Gabrielle Goliath’s Personal Accounts and Guadalupe Maravilla’s Piedras de Fuego (Fire Stones) and collectively unpack questions raised by these two exhibitions on the subjects of violence, trauma and healing. We will start by considering the artist’s choice to edit out the spoken words in Personal Accounts, critically thinking about why people feel they need to know the details of someone’s experiences in order to empathise, and how words can be either used towards or weaponized against the truths of survivors' experiences. Khudejha will connect childhood experiences of trauma to disadvantage in later life, taking us to consider Guadalupe Maravilla’s journey as an eight-year-old migrant. The tour will then return to Gabrielle Goliath’s work There’s a river of birds in migration to think about the importance of creative practice in the process of reclamation and healing from Patriarchal violence.