The Long and Short of It: Living History Workshops

This workshop is an invitation to shift the stories that make us who we are into different contexts and forms, sharing not only personal anecdotes, but family ones also.

Led by Alia Syed this workshop will involve sharing memories through objects. You will need to bring an object of personal significance (which will be returned to you) that fits into the palm of your hand - more or less - and a willingness to share. But don't tell anyone what your object is, it needs to remain a secret.

The stories and images collected in this workshop will become building blocks to explore ways of storytelling, sharing different methods to spark the creative process. We will capture the ways we interpret and preserve our histories, exploring the richness and complexities of our cultures.

This type of memory sharing can often be just the beginning; this session is intended to invite responses that allow us to travel into new, yet-to-be-imagined forms.

The session will end with a showing of two films by Alia Syed.

Please note:

This workshop is open to all.

Alia Syed

Alia Syed was born in Swansea, Wales and lives between London and Glasgow. She has been making experimental films in Britain for over 30 years. Syed is interested in how subjectivities are produced through culture, diaspora and location. Her work interrogates the protean nature of self-narration: enfolding fact, fiction, present and past, how histories are made and unmade. Syed is developing a new body of work based in Glasgow

Syed’s films have been shown at numerous institutions around the world as well as several solo exhibitions at Talwar Gallery in New York and New Delhi. Most recently she was Artist in Focus at Open city documentary film festival in London 2021. In 2019 Meta Incognita was shown as part of Migrating Worlds: The Art of the Moving Image in Britain at the Yale Centre of British Art, and in 2022 was part of (Im)materialworlds at Sands film festival in St Andrews. She was Artist in Focus at Courtisane Festival Gent in Belgium 2019. Other exhibition of note, include Delirium Equilibrium at KIran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi 2018, Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2012-13, 5th Moscow Biennale (2013); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2010); Museo National Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid (2009); XV Sydney Biennale (2006). Syed films are distributed by LUX Artists’ Moving Image, she was shortlisted for the 2015 Jarman Award and the Paul Hamlyn Artists Award in 2020.