About this Event
RRS x Arika: Curating Absolute Disorder
3 – 4.30pm Wednesday 11th November 2026
The Sanctuary - Renfield Centre, 260 Bath St Glasgow, G2 4JP
Free but ticketed – Book via Eventbrite
Join us from 3pm on Wednesday 11th November for Curating Absolute Disorder, a special in-conversation event with Françoise Vergès and Dr Nat Raha – this event is part of at Tramway, Glasgow from 11 – 15 November.
How can we acknowledge the violent history of museum and gallery collections? Can we detach Western art from capitalist systems?
Join political theorist, curator and writer Françoise Vergès to delve deeper into her latest book, A Programme of Absolute Disorder: Decolonizing the Museum, which dissects the liberal ideology that relies on, sustains and creates Western art traditions. Reflecting on the need for a radical overhaul, Vergès will share insights into the possibilities of a ‘post-museum’. Following this short lecture, Vergès will be joined in conversation by Dr Nat Raha to further consider decolonial curatorial practice.
‘One of the greatest thinkers of our time, surprises us again with a brilliant work on decolonising the museum. Françoise Vergès demonstrates how insidiously the museum contemplates a colonial order, and offers an intelligent, critical and vivid new approach. A Programme of Absolute Disorder is a masterpiece required reading’ Grada Kilomba, interdisciplinary artist and writer
‘Enacting the decolonial task to imagine and practice a post museum, Vergès also enacts the gargantuan task of a post historical, post epistemic archive. This obliges the absolute disorder of the structures of thought and feeling that sustain the impossibility of history and knowledge unoccupied by the modern archive. Showing it should be done, Vergès offers creative joyful relentlessness towards decolonial worlds.’ Marisol de la Cadena, Professor of Anthropology, Science & Technology Studies, University of California, Davis
Françoise Vergès (La Réunion/ France. Ph.D in Political Theory, University of Berkeley, 1995), writes on the racist fabrication of premature death, decolonial feminism, the impossible decolonization of the western museum, climate disaster and decolonial politics of vital needs. She has written films on Maryse Condé and Aimé Césaire, collaborates with artists, and, since 2015, curates L’Atelier which produces public performances with artists and activists. She is editorial advisor for choreographer Benjamin Millepied’s Paris Dance Project.
Françoise Vergès is currently working on a book and two films about communist anti-colonial struggles in Reunion Island through her parents’ personal archives and her own. Recent publications: Making the World Clean. Wasted Lives, Wasted Environment and Racial Capitalism (2024), Program of Absolute Disorder Decolonizing the Museum A Decolonial Feminism (2024), A Decolonial Feminism (2021).
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, hirstories 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. Her books of poetry include apparitions (nines) (Nightboat Books, 2024), of sirens, body & faultlines (Boiler House Press, 2018), and countersonnets (Contraband Books, 2013). Nat’s work is anthologised in 100 Queer Poems and We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics. Her poetry has been translated in numerous languages. Recent performances include epistolary (on carceral islands), co-commissioned by Edinburgh Art Festival, Scotland and TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, Galway, Ireland, 2023.
Recent critical writing appears in Queer Print in Europe, Transgender Marxism (Pluto Press, 2021), New Feminist Literary Studies (CUP, 2020) and Third Text (‘Imagining Queer Europe then and now’, 2021). With Mijke van der Drift, Nat is co-author of Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds (Pluto Press, 2024), co-editor of Radical Transfeminism zine, and co-author of the article ‘“They would plant the rose garden themselves”: Femmeness, Complicity, Solidarity’ in Social Text.
This event is co-hosted by The Glasgow School of Art Fine Art Critical Studies Department and the Race, Rights & Sovereignty series, and is part of Arika Episode 12: From the Rivers to the Seas, which takes place from 11th – 15th November. For more information, please visit arika.org.uk. The Episode is supported by Creative Scotland, Paul Hamlyn Foundation, Tramway, Glasgow Life and the Consulate General of Brazil Edinburgh.
This event is part of the Race, Rights & Sovereignty ‘States of Matter’ strand, which considers interactions between art and statehood, asking how practitioners shift our present states of living. Race, Rights and Sovereignty is a programme supported by the GSA Students Association in partnership with GSA Exhibitions.
Image: Françoise Vergès. Credit: Anthony Francin/la fabrique (2026)
Event venue & nearby stays
The Sanctuary - Renfield Centre, 260 Bath Street, Glasgow, United Kingdom
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