Selfridges have partnered with Fierce to host an in store programme as part of the Healing Gardens of Bab. Customers are invited to join and explore a variety of exhibitions, workshops, DJs and live performances throughout July and it’s all totally free.

EXHIBITING ARTISTS
Girth of Venus, Club Até, Sunil Gupta & Charan Singh, Rosanna Raymond & Sione Monu

DJ LINEUP
Lady Shaka, Lagoon Femshayma, Shivum Sharma
Club Bandit, DJ Betti Forde, Island:T, Just Soriah, LMGM, Mystic Meg, Q Sermon, Romo Weeks, Sexy Roy

Performances include Sydney’s Justin Shoulder, the For the Culture Collective and more to be announced.

Workshops are free to attend and can be booked here.

Workshop Schedule

Saturday 2 July 14:00 – 15:30 & 16:00 – 17:30

Queer Botanical Drawing

Queer Botany and local illustrator EL Thrush have teamed up to host illustration workshops around plants and art. The session will work with real plant samples exploring the media of ink and pen. ​

Based more in the meditative and expressive quality of drawing rather than a scientific approach, we will warm up with some brief exercises to get familiar with the media, followed by a couple of longer drawing exercises. We will also discuss scientific and cultural correlations between queerness and plants. ​

All skill levels are welcome. All materials will be provided (although you are welcome to bring your own) along with plants that you can take home. This will be a space space to play, observe and learn. ​Expect flowery language, gender (and paint) fluidity, and a queered appreciation of the natural world around us.

Sunday 3 July 13:00 – 14:30 & 15:30 & 17:00

Queering Culture: Fermenting Futures with Kirsty Clarke

Fermentation is a vital and contaminating process by which shapeshifting microorganisms transform fresh ingredients into radically new cultured funks of deliciousness. ​Join artist Kirsty Clarke for a short introductory workshop in the art of fermentation amongst the Healing Gardens of Bab at Selfridges. You will create your own pickle while learning fermentation’s imperfect, do-it-yourself ethos. Empowering you to experiment with your own fabulous ferments at home. ​

Saturday 9 July 14:00 – 15:30 & 16:00 – 17:30

Botanical Beat Make Up Tutorial with Drag Queen Artist Lilith

This makeup workshop, facilitated by acclaimed Birmingham Drag Artist and Makeup whizz Lilith and collaborating MUA Wez Watson is for all ages and skill levels. Sometimes makeup can be an environment where people can feel intimidated so we want to create a welcoming space for people to play and join in. ​Join Lilith in creating floral looks incorporating real leaves and flowers into our makeup processes. Lilith will also look at a number of application techniques such as colour packing, stamping and blending.

Sunday 10 July 13:00 – 14:30 & 15:30 – 17:00

Kahoa Tongan Garland Workshop with Sione Monu

Join this very special workshop with Auckland based artist Sione Monu.​Sione’s art practice works with nimamea’a tuikakala; or the Tongan fine art of flower designing using the form of kahoa or Tongan garland. Weaving connections between place, people and the different environments in which he works, Monu’s practice brings aspects of the spiritual and ecological contexts of art-making in Tonga and Tāmaki Makaurau together.​In this workshop we’ll use a collection of flowers, found plant materials and adhesive paper to create our own garlands.​

This workshop is suitable for all skill levels and all materials will be provided.

Saturday 16 July 14:00 – 15:00 & 16:00 – 17:00

VOGUE for beginners hosted by Eric Scutaro

Eric Scutaro, is a Venezuelan choreographer, dance performer and Queer activist, based in Birmingham. His choreographies, workshops and performances explore hip-hop, Waacking and the Voguing style as a way to advocate for LGBTQIA+ community. His work has also stood out for doing Queer activism within the hip-hop culture in his country.​

This beginners workshop will teach you the basics of Vogue: spin, dip, pose and more in a welcoming and inclusive environment.

Sunday 17 July 13:00 – 14:30 & 15:30 – 17:00

Queering Culture: Fermenting Futures with Kirsty Clarke

Fermentation is a vital and contaminating process by which shapeshifting microorganisms transform fresh ingredients into radically new cultured funks of deliciousness. ​Join artist Kirsty Clarke for a short introductory workshop in the art of fermentation amongst the Healing Gardens of Bab at Selfridges. You will create your own pickle while learning fermentation’s imperfect, do-it-yourself ethos. Empowering you to experiment with your own fabulous ferments at home. ​

Fierce have invited artists Sunil Gupta and Charan Singh to create a new body of photographic work with LGBTQ+ refugees and asylum seekers in the West Midlands. The British Empire exported homophobia across the world and many Commonwealth countries retain these prejudiced penal codes to this day. In India, Section 377, introduced by the British in 1860 criminalised homosexuality. Gupta’s series The New Pre-Raphaelites produced in response to this law, was the inspiration for this invitation. 

When seeking asylum in the UK to escape this persecution, documentation or ‘proof’ of sexuality is required. How can someone prove an intrinsic part of their being? And what do alternative expressions of gender and sexuality look like outside of the Western context? This series allows the participants to tell their own stories and choose how they want to be seen.

Arrival is presented in partnership with Pride House. Discover the artwork next to the Pride House venue at 143 Bromsgrove Street in the gay village.

Artist Biographies

Charan Singh

Charan Singh’s (b. 1978, India) finished his practice-led PhD at the Royal College of Art. His research and practice are informed by his involvement with HIV/AIDS work and community activism, which uses the mediums of photography, video and text to explore his ‘pre-English language’ life to create artistic resistance through storytelling and fictional fragments to express multi-layered gender experiences and the ephemeral nature of queer desire. His work reclaims subaltern queer identities, sub-cultures that have been defined mainly as victims. While refusing to form of subjugation it investigates the institutionalised modes of knowledge productions that are stained with colonial past and are being overshadowed by neo-colonial narratives in India.

Sunil Gupta

Sunil Gupta is a British/Canadian citizen, (b. New Delhi 1953) MA (RCA) PhD (Westminster) who lives in London and has been involved with independent photography as a critical practice for many years focusing on race, migration and queer issues. A retrospective was shown at The Photographers’ Gallery, London (2020/21) and has moved to Ryerson Image Center, Toronto. He is a Professorial Fellow at UCA, Farnham. His latest book is “London 1982” Stanley Barker 2021 and his current exhibitions include; “Every Moment Counts: AIDS and its Feelings” at the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Norway. His work is in many private and public collections including; the Tokyo Museum of Photography, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Royal Ontario Museum, Tate and the Museum of Modern Art. His work is represented by Hales Gallery (New York, London), Stephen Bulger Gallery (Toronto) and Vadehra Art Gallery (New Delhi).

Healing Gardens of Bab Funders

A new visual art commission by Montreal based visual artist Dominique Petrin, in the city centre.

Over the past twelve years, Dominique Pétrin has worked on installations created in situ, composed of hand-silk screened printed paper, cut, assembled and pasted to walls in order to create immersive environments. Her work consists of architectural compositions inspired by the display aesthetics from the interfaces of electronic devices, with the aim of developing representations and architectures of a virtual space, with the superimposition of multiple windows, toolbars, columns and objects. The use of collage is a fundamental aspect of her practice, as a methodology to assemble and disassemble ideas, interweaving notions of craftsmanship, mass production and the ready-made. Through installation and performance, she uses intricately mixed patterns and colours, as to trouble the viewer’s cognition. She challenges the visual realm with the use of juxtaposition, distortion, perspective and contrast, in order to disturb or to reveal. Her work reflects on the nature of the interface, as an embedment for conduct, languages, values, worldviews and aesthetics into technical infrastructures that are shaping our perception of our environment. This new work will respond to the themes of the Healing Gardens of Bab.

Healing Gardens of Bab Funders

I’ve been thinking a lot about how to undo, redo, represent, reimagine, activate, and upcycle the archive. For my purposes, I’m not interested in the archive as a repository of inert objects or presentation of historical documents; I am interested in how the archive can be performed and transformed — how it can bend and defy linear time, how it can be in conversation with the past, present and also speak to the future. – Jess Dobkin

Jess Dobkin’s Wetrospective, curated by Emelie Chhangur and presented at the Art Gallery of York University (September 2021), repurposed Dobkin’s 25+ year performance art archive into a vital and pertinent engagement with a living audience. The Wetrospective celebrates the “We” of collectivity, collaboration and community and the “Wet” of slippery, messy life playfully subverting and upending conventions of the gallery, institution and exhibition practices. It’s an intimate encounter that reflects and refracts trauma, ritual, healing, memory and the necessarily untidy overlaps, intersections, collisions and frictions. The Wetrospective asks: How do archives
perform?

In this archival reading room laboratory, visitors can finger through Jess’ fonds. The space is mediated by a Digital Finding Guide with AR (augmented reality) features where you can SEARCH, SIFT, SPACE and SPREAD and a Wetrospective Major Arcana deck of cards.

It’s an invitation and an offering. You’re Welcome.

The Wetrospective Reading Room will be open at the following times:
Friday 1st July, 3-5pm
Saturday 2nd July, 12-4pm
Sunday 3rd July, 12-4pm

Jess Dobkin

Jess Dobkin is an internationally acclaimed artist. Her performance and curatorial projects are presented at museums, galleries, theatres, universities and in public spaces internationally. She was active in the downtown performance art scene in New York City before moving to Toronto in 2002. Recent projects include her 2017 Dora-nominated performance, The Magic Hour, which was developed through The Theatre Centre Residency program with support from the Canada Council, Ontario Arts Council and the Toronto Arts Council. She created The Artist-Run Newsstand (2015-2016), a one-year artist-run newsstand that operated in a vacant subway station newsstand kiosk. Her Lactation Station Breast Milk Bar (2006, 2012, 2016) continues to receive significant scholarly consideration and media attention. She was Guest Curator of MONOMYTHS at FADO Performance Art Centre (2016-2017), Guest Curator of Harbourfront Centre’s HATCH performing arts residency program (2011-2012) and a co-curator of the 7a-11d International Festival of Performance Art (2009-2012.) She has taught as a Sessional Lecturer at OCAD University, the University of Toronto and Sheridan College, and was a Fellow at the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto. Her photographic images, created to accompany her performances, are also published and exhibited as stand-alone works. Her film and video works are distributed by Vtape.

Healing Gardens of Bab