Nat Raha: epistolary (on carceral islands)

Nat Raha: epistolary (on carceral islands) is a performance as part of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts 2023: honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise, curated by Iarlaith Ní Fheorais.

Venue: Galway Arts Centre – Nuns Island Theatre
Date: Sunday 12 November 2023
Time: 2pm – 3pm

Book Free Tickets

A performance addressing the history and development of island prisons across the globe through the colonial project of the British Empire. The work travels from Bass Rock in the Firth of Forth, to outposts of ‘empyre’ such as Spike Island, Ireland, and to the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal. The performance will take the form of a sonically expansive, trans-historical poem-letter addressed to ancestors incarcerated for anti-colonial revolt. Raha considers what the rise and fall of these carceral islands can teach us about contemporary abolitionist struggles, from a transfeminist perspective.

Access: A step free venue. A single accessible parking space across the road from Nuns Island Theatre. Accessible toilet facilities available. The performance will be captioned.

About the Artist:

Dr Nat Raha is a poet and activist-scholar, and Lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies at the Glasgow School of Art. Her work is of an experimental queer lyric, attending to the everyday of marginalised lives, histories of struggle and resistance to racial capitalism, of humans and the more-than-human. She works through de/re/materialising sound, form and syntax, on the page and in performance. With Mijke van der Drift, Nat co-edits Radical Transfeminism zine, and is currently co-authoring a book Trans Femme Futures: An Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds (forthcoming, 2024).

Co-commissioned by TULCA and Edinburgh Arts Festival 2023.