Fragile Landscapes: Memory, Migration and Embodied Mapping

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.

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 Nirmal Puwar, chaired by Dr Katie Parker.

Fathi Hassan was born in Cairo in 1957 to Nubian and Egyptian parents and, working across geographies throughout his career, Fathi 's visual language is unique; an open and fluid language influenced by memories of his nomadic life. The conversation will explore contemporary art practices and how displaced peoples consider the mapping process as an embodied experience that enables the re-remembering and preservation of stories and cultural practices.

Speaker and chair biographies

Nirmal Puwar is a co-director of the Centre for Feminist Research and a co-convenor of the MA Gender, Sexuality, Creative Practice degree programme. In 2005 she co-founded the Methods Lab. Her classic 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. She is currently working on a revised Italian version of the book with a group of scholars. 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: Noise of the Past (AHRC), Pierre Bourdieu in Algeria (ESRC), 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 https://www.juncture-digital.org/mattering-press/Hear-Here-Spatial-Practices/

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. Across her research, Rohini is committed to collaborative, ethically grounded and critically decolonial methods that make space for Indigenous knowledges, embodied memory and alternative histories. Her work contributes to debates on “race”, migration, belonging, heritage and the politics of representation within and beyond academia

Chair

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 also 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.

Event schedule

5-5.30 pm: Time for guests to view the art hang at PMC

5.30-6.30 pm: Brief intro and panel discussion with Nirmal Purwar and Rohini Rai

6.30-7.00 pm: Q&As, chaired by Katherine Parker

7.00-7.30 pm: Drinks receptions

Image caption: The Light Man’s Historical Footstep, 1985. Image courtesy of Fathi Hassan

✖ Level access

✔ Livestreamed

✔ Recorded

✔ Hearing loop available (please contact [email protected])

✔ Closed caption on Zoom

✖ BSL

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If you wish to inform us of any access requirements, please email events@paul-mellon-centre.

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