Intimacies & Tyrannies: The Colonial Topographies of the Internet
Presented at John Hansard Gallery, University of Southampton, in partnership with The Box, Plymouth, this symposium is a collaboration between two coastal cities and a sharing of knowledge, supported by Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.
“A Day To Gather, To Heal, To Pause, To Purge, To Vomit, To Cry, To Breathe, To Lament, To Rage, To Repair, To Create.”
“A solidarity” curated by artist and writer Osman Yousefzada, co-convened with Prof Tom Trevor (University of Exeter).
To accompany John Hansard Gallery's current exhibition, With the certainty of tides, still I rise, this half-day symposium is a gathering of thinkers and academics for conversation, food, essays and presentations, serving as a catalyst and a launching pad around the ideas inherent in artist Osman Yousefzada’s work and his wider practice. The symposium brings together two central threads in Yousefzada’s practice: Intimacy, reflected in the deeply personal dimensions of his work and Tyranny, which engages with global narratives shaped by colonial histories. His recent exhibitions at John Hansard Gallery and The Box move between these contrasting yet interrelated themes. Drawing on those exhibitions, the symposium will examine intimacy and tyranny through the broader perspectives of contemporary academic thought and artistic practice.
Symposium
At its heart, the Assembly focuses on Yousefzada’s Provocation: Intimacies & Tyrannies
“The maps of undersea data cables, mirror the surface of colonial and neo-colonial shipping routes. The visible disturbances echo the non-visible architectures; carrying codes, networks and databases of extraction. The turbulence mirrors each other, its violence, its ability to change our landscapes, our ecologies, our intimacies, our labour and its migratory patterns. And now that colonisation has satiated itself horizontally, this knowledge of extraction is used to expand and extract vertically. Coloniality does not die, it re-invents itself. The Symposium asks – How do contemporary knowledge systems echo colonial power dynamics and how are these wobbly histories, architectures, and timelines interconnected, and what radical shifts and intimacies are needed to reclaim these narratives?”
Tale of Two Coastal Cities: Tying two exhibitions at John Hansard Gallery and The Box
At John Hansard Gallery in With the certainty of tides, still I rise, Yousefzada presents three new commissions exploring migration, memory, and myth through sculpture, sound, and text. The sound of Mother (2025) reimagines furniture as a symbolic body of the mother ‘pregnant’ with seeping water, evoking intimacies in shared space. Looking for Baba (2025) features archival photos of lascars collaged with manats (prayers or promises). Indian sailors who served on P&O ships during the World Wars were integral to the colonial project. Yousefzada found these in Southampton Archives while tracing his lascar grandfather’s journeys between 1915 and 1944, who served on indentured contracts. These personal explorations expand into research on family, migration, and maritime history. Someone Died to Make Someone Else Free (2025), a large scale tapestry draws inspiration from the Waq-Waq Tree, a mythical tree in Islamic Foklore, situated in a land of abundance bearing human-like fruit. These commissions weave a narrative that connects us to sites of births and death, and the cyclical natures of giving and receiving life, bridging personal histories and collective memory.
Yousefzada’s wider practice resonates with themes explored in his earlier solo exhibition When Will We Be Good Enough? at The Box, Plymouth (2 November 2024–9 March 2025). The exhibition invited us to explore Britain’s colonial past, interrogate the realities of our present digital age and consider how they might be interlinked. In this thought-provoking installation, Yousefzada combined historical collections from The Box with his sculptures and textiles, providing clues for audiences to consider. Boats loaded with cargoes symbolised colonial extraction from the Global South. They sailed towards a carpet island surrounded by busts of digital ‘overseers’ as our ‘New Emperors’ who conducted an orchestra of everyday metal objects to emit a low hum, reflecting exploited lives and labour. Bringing the narrative full circle, tapestries of silhouetted queer figures peered out from the physical fringes, suggesting an alternative to power structures, a freer space from which to engage with a hostile world.
Speakers include:
Provocation: Osman Yousefzada
Keynote address: Prof Omar Kholeif (Glasgow School of Art)
Panelists: Dr Syed Mustafa Ali (Open University); Prof Louise Siddons (University of Southampton); Prof Wolfgang Suetzl (Ohio University); Dr Yaiza Hernández Velázquez (University of Southampton); Dr Jaya Brekke (NYMtech); Prof Alexandra Anikina (University of Southampton); Prof Dina Lupin (University of Southampton); Prof Stephanie Jones (University of Southampton); Prof Tom Trevor (University of Exeter).
Lines of History - Osman Yousefzada's Entangled Pasts, by Ekow Eshun, 2024
Images: Osman Yousefzada, When Will We Be Good Enough, 2024, installation at The Box, Plymouth, photographed by Dom Moore