During this talk Roo Dhissou will share her experience and journey, advising on how to begin and maintain a career as an artist alongside your day job or studies, including building up experience, fundraising and getting your work programmed.
About R00
Roo Dhissou is a British, Indian, (British Asian, Punjabi, and all things in between and beyond) multidisciplinary artist based between Birmingham and The Black Country, UK. Roo 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.
She has both exhibited and completed residencies in the Midlands and has also been the recipient of the prestigious Gertrude Aston Bowater Bequest as well as the Inaugural AIS Award 2020 and Tate Liverpool Artists Award 2020. Roo has both a BA Hons and MA in Fine Art. Roo currently works with contemporary art gallery Ikon in Birmingham as a Research Assistant for Ikon in the 1990s with Keith Piper funded by the Paul Mellon Centre. This year she will be working with Coventry Biennial and more recently has had work acquired for New Art Gallery Walsall’s Twenty Twenty Collection. Roo’s work although not seemingly obvious is informed by cultural trauma and experiences of being a British Asian woman, exploring personal and political narratives through a multiplicitous and playful practice. She is interested in establishing further research into Cultural Dysphoria as a Philosophy.
Blast! Creative Network
This talk is hosted as part of Multistory’s Blast! Creative Network programme. Taking place online once a month the BCN programme offers talks, workshops, opportunities and social events to bring emergent artists based in Sandwell or the Black Country a rolling events programme that provides a space for knowledge sharing and support.
Please message [email protected] with any questions.