Artist Beverley Bennett presents an interactive sound and sharing session reflecting on her Simon Says/Dadda collaborative research project with Curator Elvira Dyangani Ose

Simon Says/Dadda (2018-) is a collaborative research and development project towards the production of a new film, working with a community of black women across 5 regions in the UK. This film will collect testimonial experiences of patriarchy from over 30 women of colour. The workshops will encourage creativity and the sharing of the personal and political. It will establish a nurturing and supportive network of women across the UK that will platform under-represented voices and bodies in the art world. A public sharing event will take place in each regional location following a series of workshops which will look at film, music, drawing, poetry and cooking.

This programme takes place within Theaster Gates’s installation Black Image Corporation presented by Prada, The Vinyl Factory, and The Showroom. Collective Intimacy is inspired by Gates’s ethos of collaboration and The Showroom’s commitment to togetherness and communal knowledge, taking on multiple trans-located narratives of the current Black experience as a point of departure for a cosmopolitan worldview. In response to Gates’s reactivated spaces in Chicago and how his socially engaged projects enable communities to connect and grow, Collective Intimacy aims to create a new space for people to gather, listen, converse, and contemplate amongst a fusion of art, design, music, and everyday life.

Taking place at both 180 The Strand and The Showroom, Collective Intimacy hosts interdisciplinary interventions by artists, musicians, designers, writers, thinkers, collectives and members of the public, who are all invited to distort notions of selfhood and togetherness in the spirit of creating a global community.