Nottingham Contemporary

Expanding on our current exhibition Holding a Heart in Artifice by Abbas Zahedi, A Space for How to activates Zahedi's exhibition space through a series of monthly events that focus on the gallery as a point of gathering and intimate exchange.

A Space for How to invites practitioners to engage with Zahedi’s ongoing investigations into care and grief as well as to deliver skills and knowledge-sharing sessions. These closed sessions will offer a space of conviviality, an informal and supportive environment, to explore the themes in Zahedi’s practice as well as alternative institutional modes of collective commoning. The sessions will involve guided exercises and discussions as well as provide an opportunity for us to think about how art, galleries and the public are interconnected through mutual support systems.

In this session, writer Priya Jay will hold space for group sharings around grief, as a way of gently interrupting the silence that often surrounds processes of grieving. In her own research, she has been thinking of grief as embodied, disobedient, transgenerational and as evidence of love. This session is participatory by nature, but there is no obligation to talk or share anything that feels too personal.