Hamja Ahsan authored chapter Exit the Playground

Edited by Sarah Brown, inspired by Samuel Beckett story. Published in Ireland (2024) by Fingal County Council

Hamja Ahsan co-authored chapter: Neurodiversity, Fantasy & Revolution with Daniel Olivier & Nwando Ebizie

Published by Live Art Development (2019) UK

Daniel Oliver is dyspraxic and he creates awkward participatory performance worlds. He has done so since 2003. This book documents some of those worlds, as well as bringing together critical and creative responses by Aby Watson, Jo Hauge, Luke Ferris, O. Husch, Chloe Spicer, Hamja Ahsan and Nwando Ebizie. These writings focus on discussing, embracing, and celebrating dyspraxic approaches to performance making, socialising, world building, thinking and writing. It is especially for everyone except of course for those who choose to identify as ‘everyone’ rather that someone else – but it will be great for anyone who, for example, is invested in dyspraxia, neurodiversity, Live Art, Audience Participation, World-Building, and sentences like this one.

Featuring Chapter: On Introvert Liberation with Giulia Loi for 2022 Prague Biennial in Czech Republic

Published by Spector Books (2022)

This publication brings together new as well as existing essays, interviews, short stories, and reports from different fields and geographies on various issues, mapping the space of Eastern Europe and beyond with a special emphasis on beyond. The point of departure is exhaustion—mental exhaustion, cultural exhaustion, material and economic exhaustion—and the ensuing strategic position of weakness or softness. The texts address a variety of topics: racialization, decolonization of museums and museology, the intricacies of cultural exchange, and the implications of radical modernist traditions of thought and aesthetics. They are accompanied by artistic interventions by Dorota Brázdovičová, Markéta Soukupová, and Tarek Lakhrissi. Also included are excerpts from Pižmo, an independent magazine for strengthening cultural diversity published by the SAM83 gallery collective in Česká Bříza. The book is available in Czech and English versions and will be sold through the local distributors ArtMap and Kosmas. The English version was published in cooperation with the international distributor Spector Books.

Featured authors:
Hamja Ahsan, Giulia Loi, Gwendolyn Albert, Dorota Brázdovičová, Amanda Carneiro, Jana Krejcarová-Černá, Brenda Villanueva Fajardo, Robert Gabris, Jana Horváthová, Ábel Ravasz, Ramon Guillermo, Robin Hartanto Honggare, Filip Herza, Brigitta Isabella, Tarek Lakhrissi, Dorota Jagoda Michalska, Anna Remešová, Sráč Sam, Františka Schormová, Markéta Soukupová, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Zai Xu

Echo’s Bones is a public art project led by Sarah Browne with autistic young people in North County Dublin. It borrows its title from an unpublished story by Samuel Beckett set in that landscape, populated by unusual characters and wildlife, where an old asylum building meets the coastline. This book presents a new play devised and filmed with the young people in the same setting as the original story, nearly a century later.

Autism is not the topic of the project but a way of sensing the world and speculating about a shared future together. This book translates the approach towards the film into a different sensory medium. It features original artwork, a collection of research material from the film production, and newly-commissioned fiction and non-fiction essays by writers Blindboyboatclub, Hamja Ahsan and Roy Claire Potter.

Available online and in-person from The Library Project, Temple Bar, Dublin 2.