Fragile Landscapes: Memories, Migration, and Embodied Mapping
A panel discussion proudly co-hosted with the Paul Mellon Centre, London
On 9 September, we held Fragile Landscapes, an intimate evening and panel discussion exploring history, cartography, memory, displacement, identity, and colonialism, through the lens of Nubian artist Fathi Hassan.
The Sunderland Collection is proud to have an academic partnership between the Paul Mellon Centre, where art works by Fathi are on display until the 15 January 2027.
Following welcome remarks from the Director of the Paul Mellon Centre Dr. Sarah Victoria Turner, and Helen Sunderland-Cohen (The Sunderland Collection), there were presentations and a fascinating dialogue between Dr. Rohini Rai (Brunel University) and Prof. Nirmal Puwar (Goldsmiths University), chaired by Dr. Katie Parker (Royal Geographical Society).
A sincere thanks to the team at the Paul Mellon Centre, and to everyone who joined us in person and online.
Watch the presentations and discussion below:
About the Speakers
Professor Nirmal Puwar is a co-director of the Centre for Feminist Research at Goldsmiths University and a co-convenor of the MA Gender, Sexuality, Creative Practice degree programme. In 2005 she co-founded the Methods Lab.
Nirmal has co-edited seventeen collections including Live Methods. She has a long practice of creative and publicly engaged research spanning twenty years including several funded projects: Working with Private Media Materials in the Public Realm (AHRC), Re-Visioning Britishness (AHRC) and, most recently, Multicultural Experiments in the Civic Life of a Cathedral (British Academy), which includes a podcast series Hear Here. Her book Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place (2004) has been revisited for a twentieth anniversary issue of the European Journal of Cultural Studies.
Dr Rohini Rai is a sociologist of racialisation, Indigeneity and post/decoloniality whose work examines how marginalised communities narrate, inhabit and reimagine contested geographies. Based at Brunel University London, she develops interdisciplinary, public-facing research that brings sociology into dialogue with geography, archives, diaspora studies, performance and creative practice.
In 2023–24, Rohini led a British Academy-funded project with the Royal Geographical Society and the Institute of British Geographers (RGS-IBG), Indigenising the Himalayas, which worked with UK-based Himalayan Indigenous diaspora communities to challenge colonial imaginaries and foreground community stories. She is currently leading a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant 2026 exploring Indigeneity through dance, archival encounters and storytelling.
Dr Katherine Parker is the Cartographic Collections Manager at the Royal Geographical Society, where she protects and promotes their collection of over one million maps.
Her research focuses on the histories of maps, mapping and exploration, especially of the early modern Pacific, and Indigenous maps and mapping.
She serves as co-editor of Imago Mundi: International Journal of the History of Cartography, as the Administrative Editor for the Hakluyt Society and as a part-time lecturer in the history of architecture at New York University (NYU) in London.
©Paul Mellon Centre
About The Paul Mellon Centre
Based in London and part of Yale University, the Paul Mellon Centre is a research centre and educational charity. They are a place for conversation and community, for questioning and discovery.
The Centre supports the generation of ideas and promote the sharing of knowledge about British art to create better understandings of the past, present, and potential futures. It does this through grant-making, programming events and activities, publishing, assembling resources for research, and creating networks.
Paul Mellon, a renowned art collector and philanthropist, founded the Centre in 1970. It is a partner to the Yale Center for British Art.
Find out more by visiting paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk/
Trailblazers (Muhammed al-Idrisi) (2023) Mixed media on paper, 17.5 x 27cm ©Fathi Hassan. Courtesy of The Sunderland Collection
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