DECADES: Imandeep Kaur and Adele Patrick

SCAN launches its new public programme with a discussion between Birmingham-based civic organiser Imandeep Kaur and Adele Patrick, co-founder and director of Glasgow Women’s Library. Considering creative leadership, endurance, exhaustion, and reflective practice, this session will draw from Kaur and Patrick’s shared experience of changemaking in post-industrial urban contexts, offering strategies for working with communities to envisage and build futureproof public resources in an unfair world.

Imandeep Kaur is a Co-Founder and Director of CIVIC SQUARE, a public square, neighbourhood lab, and creative + participatory platform focused on regenerative civic and social infrastructure within neighbourhoods. Throughout her decade-long career, Kaur has focused on convening and building community, the role of citizens in radical systemic change, and how we together create more democratic, distributed, open source social and civic infrastructure. Through this work she has discovered much about economic justice and broader injustices, the pivotal role of land and social/civic infrastructure in neighbourhoods, and the value extracted from communities through our broken investment models. civicsquare.cc

Dr Adele Patrick FRSA FRSE has devised and collaborated on innovative equalities-focused cultural projects and community learning for over 30 years. She co-founded Glasgow Women’s Library in 1991 and is currently a Co-Director. Having trained as a designer at The Glasgow School of Art, Adele’s work spans the development of innovation housing projects including Take Root and Raising the Roof, research (including ongoing work on Feminist Leadership), publishing, collaborations with a wide range of creatives and work as a movement leader focused on cultural justice. Adele was Scotswoman of the Year in 2016 and currently sits on the Board of V&A Dundee. adelepatrick.co.uk | @dradelepatrick

Marking our first ten years of activity by looking to the next ten years, DECADES is SCAN’s new programme of free conversational events. Matching friends, collaborators and alumni in Scotland with the thinkers, activists and organisers who inspire them, each 90-minute event will centre an issue prescient to the lives of artists, art workers and the wider public.

We know that the past few years have seen our contemporary art community work harder than ever in navigating the compound challenges of COVID-19, Brexit and an unfolding cost of living crisis. DECADES marks a conscientious pivot for SCAN, making a space away from the present tense to envisage futures with expertise summoned from across disciplines, experiences and borders.

DECADES is an invitation to think laterally about the world we want to build and what tools we’ll need to do so. With topics expected to include the future of arts education, artists and the housing crisis, new visions for civic space and institutional power, each event will ask what conditions are needed to make a liveable world for all and a thriving environment for contemporary art in Scotland.

DECADES will take place over a number of weeknight sessions, online and in venues across Scotland, between February and April 2023.

The venue is located in the southeast of Glasgow with adequate public transport connections, we encourage participants and attendees to travel sustainably.

5 Florence Street is an 18 minute walk from Glasgow Central Station, 12 minutes from Argyle Street Station and is on the 65 bus route.

The room is accessible from street level by ramp and elevator for those with mobility needs.

This event will be live captioned.

We are able to offer a small number of travel bursaries. To apply, please send an email to [email protected] with a note of your travel costs and circumstances by 1st February 2023.

Host or Publisher SCAN