ARTIST TALK: "Queer home-making: Shitou and Mingming in dialogue with UNICORN". Place: Malmö Konsthall. Nov. 23, 18:30.
UNICORN Workshop: "Free to forbid!", part of Förbjuden kulturvecka. Host: Malmö Konsthall.
Nov. 22, 2023.
Aliens Network, an Open Conversation at OCA
IDAHOT 2023: TALK: "Experiences of grassroots organising & resistance across lands"
SmallTalks:
RåFILM x UNICORN
UNICORN x IDAHOT-kommittén.
Treasure Hunt: "Find Malmö´s Queer Treasures". IDAHOT 2021.
Friis Frame @Panora:
UNICORN x IDAHOT-kommittén
UNICORN x Moderna Museet Malmö: BETTER SAFE AND SORRY
WORKSHOPS & PUBLIC PROJECTS
For over 20 years, artists and life partners Shitou and Mingming have been creating, carving, sustaining and disseminating a home: for them, as lesbians in modern-day China, and for their communities. A home they more than once needed to pick up and take with them on the road, replanting it at the edge of yet another village, carrying the legacy and manifesto of a queer generation from one place to another. Queer women’s stories are often scarce even in more egalitarian historical circumstances, and unmentioned in all others. Life and work partners Ramona Dima and Simona Dumitriu – representing UNICORN – have witnessed this absence for years, as they, through research, unearth smaller and smaller pieces of surviving memories, like shards of broken terracotta, soon like grains of sand slipping between one’s fingers. To know the stories which ground a queer person’s present is a vital step in building a queer home, a hope of community, a chosen family. The talk at Malmö Konsthall reminisce such stories, finding the threads that unite them, attempting to build them a home once again, elsewhere. It will be held in English, translated by Jinyan Zeng. THE PARTICIPANTS: →→→ Shitou (born 1969) is a Chinese activist, performer, filmmaker, multimedia artist, and queer icon. She has been active in the Chinese gay scene since the 1990s and was the first lesbian to come out on Chinese television. After starring in the lesbian-themed film “Fish and Elephant”, Shitou directed several films, many in collaboration with her life partner, Mingming: “Dyke March” (2002), “Women Fifty Minutes” (2006) and “We Are Here” (2015). She is one of the initiators of the China Queer Independent Film group (CQIF, 2008). →→→ Ramona Dima is a researcher in gender and queer studies specialized in South-Eastern Europe. Simona Dumitriu is an art producer, writer and curator. →→→ Jinyan Zeng is a filmmaker and Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies at Lund University. Her research focuses on gender and sexuality, culture and politics, intellectual identity and social activism, as well as ethnicity, with particular emphasis on China.
We are inviting Malmö’s youth to a workshop of imagination, addressing questions of forbidden culture, freedom of speech, “canceling” and how limitations and consequences of freedom exist in different contexts. What if, all of a sudden, you would become the citizen of a country where something vital to your existence is forbidden? What would that be, and what would you do? What would a society look like where your thoughts were confined? Can creativity thrive within boundaries? Or, have you ever thought about something you yourself would forbid, should you be free to do so? For two hours, you are welcome to join a workshop where such questions, actions and consequences, as well as ethical considerations will be central. Through impassioned debates we are going to experience a land of limitations that will challenge our beliefs and shed light on the essence of freedom. To conclude the workshop we will create collaborative poetic manifestos, offering tools of expression for thoughts and questions that may have long lingered in your mind. Workshop facilitators: Hanna Una Holmquist, Ramona Dima, Samaneh Roghani, Simona Dumitriu. Workshop languages: Swedish and English. More info here: https://shorturl.at/orBHI Image credit: Samaneh Roghani.
UNICORN participates in Aliens Network, a transnational effort established by Verdensrommet to gather tools, exchange knowledge and bring answers to crucial challenges faced by non-EU/EEA creative professionals working in the Nordics.
For the first assembly of the network, Verdensrommet is presenting this open conversation with representatives of the six grassroots organizations in the Nordic region. More details here.
Welcome to a discussion on queer, feminist, antiracist and antifascist organising in different lands. ▶︎ This a hybrid event: offline hosted by Amalthea Bokkafé in Malmö, and online. Our guest speaker, Ruxandra Costescu, plays a fundamental role in queer, feminist and animal rights grassroots organising in Romania. Ruxandra will share her experience in several different countries on two continents, and across different ways of practicing activism. The ensuing discussion may touch upon topics such as intersectional experiences, the effects of gender essentialism on today’s activism, or how to organise in the Swedish context if compared with other contexts. In the frame of IDAHOT, which strives to be a grassroots alternative to mainstream Pride, what are the possible ways to organise, and be aware of each other’s position and experience, in resistance or in solidarity? Co-organisers: UNICORN Artists in Solidarity, IDAHOT-kommittén and Amalthea Bokkafé.
SmallTalks is a collaboration between RåFILM and UNICORN - Artists in Solidarity – a project bringing art, film and their methods to people's everyday life and political discussions. In collaboration with ABF Malmö and funded by Malmö Stad. Read more about the project at https://smalltalksmalmo.wordpress.com/
(EN/SV) Idahot-Kommittén in Malmö and Unicorn artist collective invite you all to a THREE DAY TREASURE HUNT! Link to the treasure hunt: https://idahotmalmo.wordpress.com/ This Quest is another form of march or demonstration, but made to meet safely, digitally and with physical distance, to play and discover new, maybe unknown things about malmös queer underground gems. All you need is at least one smartphone that can read qr-codes and a prefered way to move around the city, by bike, walking, wheelchairing or any other. headphones might be a good idea and remember to charge your battery! Let’s share our sweet spots, our political demands, enjoy movies and antifascist meditations, learn about our city’s queer corners and get inspired to agitate and organize! All the generous contributions to this year’s IDAHOT have been made or shared for free - we are thankful and respectful of that. /// Låt oss mötas tryggt, digitalt och med fysiskt avstånd när det gäller. Låt oss leka och upptäcka nya, kanske okända rikedomar i malmös queera undre värld. Allt du behöver är åtminstone en smartphone som kan läsa qr-koder och ditt bästa sätt att ta dig runt i stan, det kan vara på cykel, promenadvägen, rullstolsrullande eller något annat. Länk till skattjakten: https://idahotmalmo.wordpress.com/
Första eventet inom ramen av FRIIS FRAME blir på Internationella dagen mot homo-, bi- och transfobi. IDAHOT-kommittén Malmö tillsammans med Unicorn konstnärsnätverk presenterar ett filmpaket bestående av Los muchos triangulos rosas och Mes Chéris.
Better safe and sorry is a new collaborative work by Malmö-based artist Bahareh Mirhadi and Tehran-based artist Arash Mirhadi, constructed and performed as part of the Weekly Mass exhibition at Skånes konstförening. They are siblings and are this year’s recipients of the Unicorn Artists in Solidarity residency grant. Simona Dumitriu and Tawanda Appiah, curators of Weekly Mass, will moderate the Artist talk with Bahareh and Arash Mirhadi at Moderna Museet Malmö. Their projected work was centered around collaboration, family memories, control and the differences that distance constructs. When Arash Mirhadi’s visa application and subsequent appeal were rejected, distance became enforced onto them as a method. Furthermore, the power and control that institutions exert became the starting point of their installation and performance. Control and institutionalised distrust breaks relationships and reaffirms, again and again, the pyramid of power. Schengen/EU use profiling as a tool to hinder mobility and access when requested by residents of countries framed as “a risk” in migration law terms. What is more important, freedom or security? This is one of the key questions asked by the artists in the ellusive room of the installation. It is also one of the key questions framing their talk. Moderated by the two curators of Weekly Mass, Simona Dumitriu and Tawanda Appiah, the talk will address Bahareh and Arash’s most recent work in the wider logic of their solo and collaborative practices.