The Apocalypse Reading Room Residencies

Lateisha Davine Lovelace-Hanson and Mohammed Z Rahman were selected from an open call process for a three-month residency programme at Artsadmin’s home, Toynbee Studios, where Ama Josephine Budge’s The Apocalypse Reading Room was installed in the Arts Bar & Café.

From 1 July-30 September 2021, the artists were invited to sit in and with the space and the collection, and use this residency as a chance to think, read and create in silence as well as in conversation with one another and the books themselves.

The project’s founder/curator artist Ama Josephine Budge was in dialogue with both artists, offering feedback, support and conversation, and there were public events and online activity with Lateisha and Mohammed over the summer.

Meet the artists

Lateisha Davine Lovelace-Hanson

Lateisha Davine Lovelace-Hanson is a performer, writer, theatre-maker, somatic practitioner, educator, community-healer, curator and facilitator of Jamaican heritage who enjoys swimming in open water, tending to what grows and plant-based cooking/nurturing/futuring.

Lateisha inhabits embodied tools for connection, intimacy and transformation – creatively accessing tools and healing pathways we need to live, love, and thrive through and beyond trauma, marginalisation and oppression. Their work flows across intersections of race, gender, queerness, class, earth-climate and (dis)placement/diaspora, rooted in prophetic wisdoms of Black, Indigenous and POC queer feminist ecologies. They’ve worked intergenerationally and interdimensionally through social-engagement over the last 15 years.

Lateisha is the creator of TO THE RITUAL KNOWLEDGE OF REMEMBERING, a community-lead project space exploring decolonial relationships to our bodies, memory and the land.  Involving a 3 day retreat for 13 artists & activists ( co-developed with LADA, supported by ]performance space[ and Diverse Actions). As well as inviting 14 international QT/BIPOC healers & artists to co-facilitate a programme of free events (supported by 12ø collective).
Follow Lateisha on Instagram: @lateisha_davine

“The Apocalypse Reading Room residency excites me and fills me with a deep knowing: trust, unfurling and possibility. Spaaaaaace. I can’t wait to arrive into the space-time that this residency will help me unlock – for me to gather all of myself and simply sit – read – write – rest – imagine – conjure – absorb – create – release. To nourish myself and others with new words, old texts and echoes of what it means to be alive right now, to be a child of the past and elder of the future.”

Lateisha Davine Lovelace-Hanson

Mohammed Z Rahman

Mohammed Z Rahman is a British-Bengali writer, painter and illustrator based in East London. His work often deals with food, migration and gender. Mohammed’s literary output includes short stories, poetry and creative non-fiction, and his visual output includes illustration, painting and zines.

Graduating from SOAS, University of London, with a BA in Social Anthropology, Mohammed approaches art as both an intimate and political force. Drawing on global, queer, self-reflexive and critical perspectives Mohammed’s work celebrates his communities’ dreams, disrupts violent power structures and makes peace with the unspeakable chaos of the world. 

Mohammed has enjoyed working with grassroots arts organisations including clavmag, Writing Our Legacy, Failsafe Magazine, Skin Deep Magazine, Aire Place Studios and The Willowherb Review. He has also worked on various projects and placements with cultural institutions including the Goethe Institut, UCL Culture, Tate Modern, the Smithsonian Institute and V&A East.
Follow Mohammed on Instagram: @m.z.r.supply

“I’m curious and excited for the conversations ahead and what they will inspire. It’s such a blessing to be a resident at the Apocalypse Reading Room, both to build as a radical response to the relentless grind, and to heal as an oasis for artists during this rough time. I have a feeling this experience will be deeply transformative and can’t wait to digest, collaborate and of course, read!”

Mohammed Z Rahman

Find out more about The Apocalypse Reading Room

These residencies are supported by BE PART through the Creative Europe programme of the European Union.