For this online talk, artist Uma Breakdown is joined by Joseph Buckley, Dr Karen Di Franco and Dr Alice Rekab to discuss the concept of ‘relics’. Often defined as an object invested with historical or cultural significance or ideology, what happens to our understanding of them when their stories are incomplete or unstable?

Uma's Earth A.D. 2 is currently on display in our first floor gallery and can be explored online. Earth A.D. 2 an expansive body of work, spanning immersive installation, writing and video games, and draws on their research into ongoing collective repair. The work explores the structures and history of Gothic narratives, and their creative relationships to time, space, identity and social relations.

Joining the event

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Speaker Biographies

Uma Breakdown

Uma Breakdown is a disabled artist, writer, and award winning game designer interested in animals, horror, and queer feminist literature. Everything they make is about some combination of love, grief, hallucination, and an excess of joy.

Joseph Buckley

Joseph Buckley is a black british sculptor of Irish and Caribbean extraction. He is based in New York City and has, for the last five years or so, been making work about the historical, fictional, contemporary, and speculative abuses that render people into chattel, suspects, orcs, and clones.

Dr Karen Di Franco

Dr Karen Di Franco is Programme Leader of M. Litt Curatorial Practice (Contemporary Art) at Glasgow School of Art. Her background includes teaching post-graduate students in curating, history of art, and writing, where she specialises in post-1960s feminist art practice, artists’ publishing and the context of iteration and conceptualism in fiction writing and performance Her PhD research titled Embodied Iteration: Materialising the Language of Writing and Performance in Women Artists’ Publishing, 1968–1979was funded by the AHRC collaborative Doctoral Partnership and based between the University of Reading and Tate Britain (2015-2020).

Dr Alice Rekab

Alice is a visual artist based in Dublin. They are concerned with expressions and iterations of complex cultural and personal narratives. Alice takes their own mixed-race Irish identity as a starting point to explore the idea of the body, the family, and the nation as reflections of one another. They develop these ideas through material investigations and renditions of family, its bodies, and the spaces they move through and inhabit. Through a practice of film, performance, image, and sculpture, Alice creates new intersectional narratives and objects for exhibition.