Hamja will be in Amsterdam 18th March - 28th March 2023 with public events at Stedelijk & Artistic Research Studios

Hamja will be in Amsterdam 18th March - 28th March 2023 with public events at Stedelijk & Artistic Research Studios

Hamja Ahsan is an award-winning artist, writer, public speaker, curator and activist

Livestream online 19th March 1pm-5pm (CET time - check your local time zone. GMTUK time 12pm-4pm) here

Amsterdam Events - March 2025

Stedelijk X Rietveld: Studium Generale

Radical Accessibility – Crip pedagogies, Crip theory, Crip practice

https://tickets.stedelijk.nl/Exhibitions/Register?id=abc4a188-6cd9-ef11-a2ed-a24efadd6278&refresh=y&language=EN

Events — 19 until Mar 21, 2025

Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and Gerrit Rietveld Academie present Radical Accessibility: Crip Pedagogies, Crip Theory, Crip Practice, a multi-day event featuring lectures, presentations, screenings, and performances by international artists, theorists, and Rietveld students. Part of the collaboration is the conference series Studium Generale, which this year explores disability justice and the accessibility of art through a ‘Crip’ perspective. The event culminates in a festive Friday Night. Find more information on the project here.

Price

Museumticket + €3,- (per day)
Rietveld students free of charge on presentation of student card on March 19, 20 & 21.

Location

Auditorium

Time

19 until Mar 21, 1 pm until 5 pm

Main language

English

Admission

Tickets

Studium Generale 2024-25 explores the accessibility of art and cultural practices through a ‘Crip’ perspective. This approach emphasizes interdependency, mutual solidarity, and shared responsibility among our diverse bodies and minds. Once a term used negatively to describe people with disabilities, ‘Crip’ has been reclaimed by artists, activists, and scholars as a positive and empowering term, akin to ‘queer.’ It challenges harmful norms and prejudices and examines how disability intersects with gender, race, class, sexuality, and the environment, encouraging us to consider these connections on both personal and political levels. 

Despite this, numerous barriers persist in our daily lives and learning environments. Many spaces remain inaccessible due to poor design and a lack of adequate accommodations and tools. Educational materials often marginalize or overlook diverse voices and bodyminds. By working with Crip artists, activists, and thinkers, we aim to reimagine the academy, our community, and our artistic practices through this Crip lens. How can we make accessibility a core aspect of our learning, thinking, and creating, rather than an afterthought or add-on? 

PROGRAM

MARCH 19: The World is Our Corner: Neurodivergent Homelands and Landscapes


Guest curated by Hamja Ahsan, with Sarah Browne and Ipek Burçak  

Hamja Ahsan envisions a transnational liberation movement and utopic homeland of Aspergistan—for neurodivergent, quiet people and introverts—within his book Shy Radicals: Antisystemic Politics of the Militant Introvert. His keynote will explore the expansive practice of Shy Radicals, which extends beyond the book through film, installation, zine archives, and, more broadly, as a decentralized curatorial culture.   

He invites İpek Burçak, the first artist to bring the concept of Aspergistan and its coined terms into another space through her risograph book The Autistic Turn and accompanying multidisciplinary practice in sound, publishing, film, and performance.   

Joining the conversation, artist Sarah Browne will present her film project Echo Bones: A Parallel Play, which reinterprets Samuel Beckett’s fiction by working with a community of adolescents diagnosed with autistim in Ireland.  
These practices speculate on a shared future within real and imagined worldscapes, beyond the pathological, medical, and correctional.



Collective dream work:
The World’s First Neurodiversity Zine Fair

ZINE hang out & think-in
with Hamja Ahsan & friends

email: team@artisticresearch.org to attend


wednesday 26 march

18:00 -22:00

Event Location: Artistic Research Foundation IJburglaan 1503, 1087 KM, Amsterdam



Hamja Ahsan has been making and collecting zines for over 30 years. He is in possession of what is probably the world’s largest zine archive on the topic of neurodivergence, and advocates for the zine as a medium for all ages to access a practice of creative play within the drudgery of adulthood.



At the same time, Hamja understands zines as a tool of activism and empowerment. For five years, he organised the DIY Cultures Fair in London, which distinguished itself by its commitment to Black and people of colour empowerment and centralising marginalised histories and subcultures, including decolonising initiatives, diaspora stories, prisoner solidarity, radical mental health and Muslim communities under the War on terror.



Together we will convivially think through making the world’s first neurodiversity zine fair. Making pages for a zine on our speculations and ideas, day dreams and experiences.



No experiences necessary. Participants can bring in zines, poems, books that have inspired them to the table. Pens, scissors, collage materials, or making zine pages, draw digitally on procreate or tablets. This may be collated together for a future zine.

Hamja Ahsan will bring in his
neurodiversity zine archive, which participants can browse for durations of the session with Zine and Chill.

Hamja will talk about the making of his influential radical zine fair & creative activist fair DIY Cultures which ran 2013-2017 in London and navigating zine worlds. How can zine fairs help us rethink participation, authority, access andinclusion? We will collectively think: what zine fair would we like to build for the future? And make concept flyers and programmes for our imagine future zine fairs.