Fragile Landscapes: Memories, Migration, and Embodied Mapping
A panel discussion proudly co-hosted with the Paul Mellon Centre, London
A panel discussion on history, cartography, memory, displacement and colonialism, reflecting on work by artist Fathi Hassan on display at the Paul Mellon Centre (PMC) in partnership with the Sunderland Collection.
Thursday 25 June 2026, from 5.00 - 7.30 pm at the Paul Mellon Centre London.
This event will also be streamed live.
Register for your free ticket here.
This reception will celebrate the exhibition of work by Fathi Hassan, including historic work alongside work made in response to The Sunderland Collection of maps and atlases, followed by a conversation between Dr Rohini Rai and Professor Nirmal Puwar, chaired by Dr Katie Parker.
Trailblazers (Muhammed al-Idrisi) (2023) Mixed media on paper, 17.5 x 27cm ©Fathi Hassan. Courtesy of The Sunderland Collection
Event Schedule
5.00 - 5.30 pm: Time to view Fathi Hassan's artwork at PMC
5.30 - 6.30 pm: Brief intro and panel discussion with Nirmal Purwar and Rohini Rai (Live and streamed online via Zoom)
6.30 - 7.00 pm: Q&As, chaired by Katherine Parker
7.00 - 7.30 pm: Drinks reception
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.
You can find out more about the presentation of Fathi Hassan’s work and The Sunderland Collection Art Programme partnership with the Paul Mellon Centre here.
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©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/
