‘Revolution: a space where i feel safe and loved’

Loraine Maiya Mponela, Ryan Christopher, Yas Lime, Sebastian Hau-Walker, and melissandre varin in conversation.

beings passing by are welcome to join in, and the raw audio recording of the conversation will be shared publicly the following week.

Loraine Maiya Mponela, a Black, mother, poet, sanctuary seeker (activist), current chairperson of Coventry Asylum and Refugee Action Group (CARAG)

Yas Lime is an early career artist-curator. They have begun to carve out a space in the DIY art scenes of Brighton and Birmingham and are currently working as an artist-curator at Eastside Projects, Birmingham. In the work made In response to the Covid 19 pandemic and lockdown they focussed on their homelife and relationships made against a backdrop of chaos, rushing and adjustment to a new job and new home.

Ryan Christopher (b.1998) Coventry, UK

Christopher’s practice explores the poetics of cultivation, ellipsis and relation. Imbued with a bond to the peripheral and the hidden, the work communes with emancipatory thought. He works through the confluence of Diasporic collectivities and poetic knowledge – a shifting ecosystem of perpetual renewal, communion and creolisation. Where otherness and unknowns unsettle modes of oppressive domination.

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In the work, tilting, abstraction and ellipsis become formal devices, and ways of carrying relations. 

We are often given fragments; bodies and systems extended in relation, peripheries made central, images dense with the inconspicuous and the irrational, the obscure and the ordinary. It is work that identifies with life.

Ideas materialise through sculpture, moving image, painting and drawing, Frequently informed by ‘the Body of Christ’, Horticulture, Theological Anthropology, Antillean literature and reflective film. 

Rupi Dhillon is a British, Indian, (British Asian, Punjabi, and all things in between and beyond) multidisciplinary artist based between Birmingham and The Black Country, UK.

Rupi explores the relationships and connections we have with one another as well as how we formulate a sense of self. Through her arts practice she investigates how multiplicity in culture is conducive to the concept of belonging and space. She is interested in facilitating discourse around race, gender and social class and the performability of these social structures.  Using playful techniques, her current work reimagines cultural experience through gestalt expression, participatory performance, shared practices, gifting and attachments in found objects. 

Sebastian H-W is a Live Artist (MX:UK) based between London the West Midlands whose practice explores the intersections of identity, memory, technology, participation, and bodies, through cutting-edge approaches to creating live performances, action-based interventions, immersive tours, games, and installations. He has made work across a range of sites, spaces, and places including; grand theatres, queer clubs, white cubes, black-boxes, historic watchtowers, city streets, quiet canals, the palm of your hand, and the voices inside your head.

melissandre varin 

Relation, displacement, multiplicity, identity, interdependency, and language emerge from melissandre’s work. Making from an Afro and Caribbean diasporic context, melissandre add layers of complexity using a situated Black feminism. Through poetic performance arts, moving image assemblages, and site-specific installations – among other things – melissandre interrogate how the encounter between bodies that have been marginalised, everyday materials, and institutional spaces transgresses normativity.

if you want to get in touch with us about access requirements or anything please write us via the following email address:

residency@coventry-artspace.co.uk .