Join us at Grand Union on Friday 1 November, 6–8pm for an evening of live performances for Digbeth First Friday. We are so pleased to welcome Linda Stupart, Hasti, and Kasra Jalilipour to celebrate Samhain through their performances.
Samhain is a Celtic Pagan festival which marks the ending and beginning of the year. This festival has historically been celebrated widely across Ireland, Scotland, and the Isle of Man. With the coming of Christianity to the British Isles, Samhain shifted into what we now know as Halloween. It is the time of year when the veil between this world and the next is at its thinnest, leaving the boundaries between the two blurred and porous. We interpret Samhain as the beginning of Winter in the Northern Hemisphere, the Gaelic word for November, the celebration of the end of Harvest time, a queer turning, a time to venerate all ancestors.
Each of these brilliant artists will individually respond to this time of transition and change through poetry and performance. Two within the walls of the gallery, and one outside by the Grand Union canal.
Each artist will perform for 30 minutes, with 10 minutes between each set.
We will be providing live-captioning and transcripts for each performance.
The gallery is located up two flights of stairs with no lift access. The canalside performance site is up 6 shallow steps, with no level access or handrail. Further access information regarding performance timings, lighting and sound will be provided soon.
About the Artists
Linda StupartOpen accordion
Linda Stupart is an artist, writer, and educator from Cape Town, South Africa currently living in Birmingham, UK.
Stupart’s recent work thinks through the climate change, embodiment, abjection and the transgression of borders. They have performed as and on top of icebergs in the Arctic Circle (2019); and are currently walking the length of the River Cole in Birmingham, dressed in natural-dyed rags; foraged plants, twine, vines, and trash collected on the river’s banks as part of Watershed (2021 — present). In 2019 they produced ‘All Us Girls Have Been Dead For So Long’ with Carl Gent – a full length sci-fi musical theatre production about dolphins, aliens, the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, climate change, queer bodies, Kathy Acker, and travelling to hell. This was performed at the ICA, London. In 2021 they worked with Carl Gent and Kelechi Anachua to produce ‘and then, a harrowing’ – a major immersive exhibition at Wysing Arts Centre, which unearths dominant and dominating relationships between bodies and ‘land’; proposing new ways of being together within ecological crises via ghosts; horses; harrows; rivers; folk singing, and digging.
Their work is generally driven by a radical site-specificity; immersing themselves in the ecologies; histories, and fictions of the immediate environment, while unearthing and troubling straight(forward) narratives of place. Stupart’s work consists predominantly of performance, film, writing and sculpture.
HastiOpen accordion
Hasti is a poet living and dreaming in South East London. Founder of fictional poetry collective ‘sluts against imperialism,’ they write into the land, speculative imaginaries, ideas of work, and a search for the world as it really is.
A member of the inaugural Southbank New Poets Collective and the Ledbury Poetry Critics, Hasti is the recipient of the 2023 White Review Poet’s Prize, the 2022 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize for Poetry, and have recently published poems in bathmagg, zindabad zine, and The Poetry Review. They have co-written short sci-fi film DIGGING, produced by Film4. Hasti also hosts open mic and poetry night Fresh Lip, and its sister show for Montez Press Radio, Fresh Air. Their pamphlet ‘U’ is forthcoming from Reference Press
Kasra JalilipourOpen accordion
Kasra Jalilipour (b.1995, Esfahan) is an Iranian multidisciplinary artist, and writer, based in Derbyshire. They work in a variety of mediums including sculpture, works on paper, moving images and live performance. Through looking at histories and speculative fiction, their work takes on the role of recreating archival histories of queerness and transness, and at times they do this by looking at how religion intersects with these often unarchived histories.
Jalilipour’s solo shows include Haarlem Artspace, Wirksworth, 2024; Gasleak Mountain, Nottingham, 2024; Arcade-Campfa at BayArt, Cardiff, 2023; Academy of Fine Art Gallery, Prague, 2018. Their live directorial debut Apocrypha of the Later Saints was commissioned by Centre for Live Art Yorkshire, Leeds, 2024.