Saturday

Saturday 11am-4pm

Camera Obscura Workshop with Brendan Barry

A practical online workshop using everyday materials (no specialist equipment needed) to transform a room in your home into a camera obscura, and then capture the projected view in a variety of ways. We’ll be meeting in the morning to cover the basics then regrouping throughout the day to share results. There will be plenty of opportunities to discuss everything from the basics to more advanced considerations around the use of lenses and ways of capturing the image.

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Saturday 11am-12pm

Sam Hutchinson, Aram Sabbah and the skaters of Asira Al-Shamaliya: Zine launch and discussion

In October 2017, artist Sam Hutchinson travelled to Palestine to volunteer with the charity SkatePal. He taught skateboarding to local young people in the West Bank village of Asira Al-Shamaliya and helped with the maintenance of a skatepark built by the charity in 2015. The publication 'Hope Hope' collects Hutchinson's photographs from this period, and we are delighted to launch it at HYPERTEXT. 100% of the profits from sales of the zine will be donated to SkatePal.

To mark the launch, Hutchinson will be in conversation with Aram Sabbah. One of the first skaters in Palestine, Sabbah completed his studies in Tunisia before returning to Palestine to help SkatePal in building ramps and teaching skateboarding. Based in Ramallah, he is now Local Manager, looking after all on-the-ground operations.

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Saturday 12.15pm-1.15pm

Books Beyond Bars: Felix McNulty in conversation with Sarah Jane Baker

Books Beyond Bars is a Manchester-based charity who send books and other educational materials, free of charge, to incarcerated LGBTQIA+ people across the United Kingdom. This year, HYPERTEXT is partnering with the charity to raise donations, and each exhibitor has the opportunity to donate unsold stock to the Books Beyond Bars inventory. In this talk, BBB volunteer Felix McNulty will be in conversation with Sarah Jane Baker, the UK's longest-serving trans inmate. Baker was released from a cumulative 30 year sentence in 2019. She is involved in various art practices across illustration, cross stitching, publishing and music, and the talk will place these in context, exploring the experience of incarceration as a trans person through a focus on art practice as a liberatory practice.

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Saturday 1.30pm-2.30pm

Jade Montserrat in Conversation with Nikita Gill

Artist Jade Montserrat and Curator Nikita Gill will be in conversation about the future plans for the recently launched exhibition project ‘Constellations: Care & Resistance’ at Manchester Art Gallery. The exhibition constitutes an active research space supporting Montserrat in creating new work to be acquired, exhibited and displayed by the Gallery. The gallery will be used both to exhibit works, curated by Gill (who has operated as a proxy for Montserrat whilst the artist is unable to attend the gallery, as in the recent online performance ‘Drawing Out’) and also as a space for discussion and pedagogy.

This event marks the beginning of a year-long conversation around the exhibition which will inform the content of a publication. The book will act as a document of the project itself but also as a continued development on themes that arise during its duration.

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Saturday 2.45pm-3.45pm

Yasmine Akim: Why we need to decolonise art schools & showcase the collective agency of marginalised people

Yasmine Akim is a photojournalist and educator based in London. In this lecture she considers the space for critical thought in contemporary arts education, the photography curriculum and its pedagogies, black feminist thought, what intersectionality can and should look like, and a critique of the colonial white male gaze and its hegemony across documentary photography. She will use examples from her own practice to explore more authentic and empowering portrayals of marginalised people and movements such as Black Lives Matter.

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Saturday 4pm-5pm

Ruth White: The Role of the Photobook in Representing the British Working Classes

Ruth White is an artist and researcher based in Liverpool. Her work looks at the role of photography and the photobook in representing social class and the formation of identity. She completed a PhD at Manchester Metropolitan University entitled 'A Practice-led Investigation into the Role of the Photobook in Representing the British Working Classes Since 1975'.

Join Ruth for a walk-through of her PhD research, which highlights the important contribution photobooks have made to our understanding of Thatcherism and how they can be used to investigate the lived experience of class. Ruth will discuss the influences on her own photography and zine-making practice, which focuses on creating a comprehensive picture of working-class life. The talk is followed by a Q&A with Sorcha Boyle, Responsive Programme Coordinator at Open Eye Gallery.

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Saturday 5.15pm-6.15pm

Instagram Live: LAW Magazine with Robert Parkinson

John Holt is the editor of LAW (Lives and Works), a magazine and creative agency. Throughout the first 2020 UK lockdown LAW instigated a number of projects in response to the social climate and pandemic. John will be chatting with Robert Parkinson, one of the organisers of HYPERTEXT, about the resulting body of work and upcoming projects. This talk will be broadcast via Instagram Live at @law_magazine and @boundartbookfair

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Sunday

Sunday 11am-12pm

OOMK: Exploring artists' publishing practices in Malaysia

One of My Kind (OOMK) is a collaborative publishing practice led by Rose Nordin, Sofia Niazi and Heiba Lamara. In 2016 they teamed up with Kuala Lumpur based Odd One Out Magazine to research independent publishing practices in Malaysia. The publication, A Study of Publishing Practices in Malaysia: KL, Penang and Ipoh, brings together interviews with the many artists, magazine makers and galleries at the forefront of self publishing in Malaysia, as well as scans of publications and reflections on publishing practices outside of London.

For this event, OOMK's Rose Nordin, an independent graphic designer, will discuss the publication and wider body of research, followed by a live link up with Kerol Izwan from Kuala Lumpur-based Musotrees, one of only two magazines published in Malaysia with international distribution. Rose and Kerol will discuss the artist publishing scene, opportunities for production and routes to publishing in Malaysia, where there are few art schools, limited printers and scant infrastructure for distribution.

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Sunday 12.15pm-1.15pm

Liz Wewiora and the Many Hands Craft Collective: Present and Continuous publication launch

Present and Continuous was the result of a twelve month collaborative photography project by artist Liz Wewiora and the Many Hands Craft Collective, an Over-60s group based in Ancoats, Manchester. The project resulted in an exhibition at Manchester Craft and Design Centre and a publication, produced in collaboration with designer Tommy Morrison.

From the project’s inception, to the conceptual ideas, production of work, editing and final curation of its public showcase, Present and Continuous aimed to test out photography as a collaborative endeavour. The group decided to focus on what brings them together, discussing age, creative agency and local geography, and why this collective—through its shared passion for craft—now consider themselves an active creative community.

The publication was due to launch physically in April 2020, but due to Covid-19 plans were put on hold. Group members Elaine and Ged are now delighted to share their reflections on the project and the publication in an online discussion with Liz Wewiora, artist and Head of Social Practice at Open Eye Gallery.

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Sunday 1.30pm-2.30pm

Digital Diary: Hashtag Your Heart Out (A workshop by Jocelyn Allen)

Jocelyn Allen is an artist who mainly works with photography, video, dance, and increasingly, text and hashtags. Her work uses self-portraiture to explore themes such as hiding and revealing, body image, self-esteem, self-confidence and anxiety, and recently pregnancy and motherhood.

In 2019 she started to use hashtags to accompany her photographs, in response to her own awkwardness around using them. Before long she was adding the maximum of 30 hashtags to her Instagram posts and ultimately using them to tell a story, or write a diary entry.

In this workshop, participants will write hashtags about how they are feeling during these weird pandemic times, and take an accompanying photograph (phone images are fine) to create an Instagram-ready diary entry.

Examples of Jocelyn’s use of hashtags can be seen on her Instagram and in her projects: Ulterior Monologue (2019), Waiting For Things In A Time When You Rarely Wait For Things (2019-2020), Puke Portraits (2019-2020), and Oh Me, Oh Mãe (2020-).

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Sunday 2.45pm-3.45pm

ROOT-ed Zine: Our Experience of Navigating through Arts and Media as People of Colour

ROOT-ed (Revolution Of Our Time) is a self-published zine and social platform that aims to promote, support, represent and inspire creative people of colour within the North West of England.

Join the founders of ROOT-ed, Amber Akaunu and Fauziya Johnson, for a talk on establishing the zine and their experiences so far. Amber and Fauziya will give insight into each zine, how they collaborate with artists, and support the publication through fundraising. They will also talk about discrimination they have faced and the influence of social movements, particularly BLM.

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Sunday 4pm-5pm

Too much of a good thing: Sound & vision by Jason Evans

www.thedailynice.com is an ongoing, online photo-therapy project launched in October 2004. One picture per day is posted, and then replaced 24 hours later. There is no archive and scant contextualisation. Images of things which made Evans happy are shown, making this a self-fulfilling quest for positivity. The work revels in pictorialism and, while documentary in approach, positions itself at odds with typical tropes of that genre and the widely uncontested melancholy of much photo theory.

Conceived as accelerated minimalism, the ambient overload of Too much of a good thing flips the slow-rhetoric of the website. Showing the equivalent of just under 2 years’ worth of content in an hour, images will play alongside a soundtrack of joyful musics. A brief essay, released at the culmination of the broadcast, will unpack the thinking and conditions around this experiment.

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