Decoded Roots

✍🏾 Rotting English: A Decolonial Writing Workshop presented by @decoded_roots 🪴, facilitated by @mahaliasobers for the exhibition ‘Refrains on the Edge of Appearance’ 📝 curated by @charcharwah , supported by @weareshoesoff at the 📍 @out.house.gallery

The Rotting English workshop has been inspired by the writings of Ken Saro Wiwa, Sam Selvon, and Édouard Glissant. Each writer respectively challenges standardised language in order to explore structures of identity, politics, history and race. 🔗 Find a link to Glissant’s essay in the bio, where he delves further into his concept of opacity within minority identities. 📆9th May, 2pm - 4pm 📍@outhouse gallery 🎟️ free tickets in bio (donations welcomes) ✍🏾 feel free to bring personal journals, pens, and picnic blankets!

Come along to our intuitive writing workshop promoting the deconstruction of ‘proper language’ ✏️📚. Hosted by @decoded_roots for the exhibition, ‘Refrains on The Edge of Appearance’, curated by @charcharwah , supported by @weareshoesoff . Through the forceful dissemination of the English language, colonised people have been forced to adapt, censor and subdue their indigenous languages in the face of oppression. However, through this forceful adaptation, oppressed people have found ways to glitch language to retain autonomy, opacity and pay homage to their pre-colonial roots. Rotting English celebrates the deviations from standardised language, encouraging people to bring their patois, singlish, creole and more to the forefront of their writing. Ignore the structures that you have internalised through rigid education, and write in a way that comes innately to you. 📝 📆9th May, 2pm - 4pm 📍@outhouse gallery, Camberwell, London 🎟️ free tickets in bio (donations welcomed) ✍🏾 feel free to bring personal journals, pens, and picnic blankets! 🥂Exhibition Private View Thursday, 7th May 2026 6 PM - 9 PM 🖼️Exhibition Opening Hours Friday - Sunday, 8th May - 24th May 2026 11 AM - 5 PM

“Those that do not smile will kill me” is a multidisciplinary exhibition by artist and researcher Jessica Ashman. The exhibition was developed in response to the horticultural archive held by the British Empire & Commonwealth Collection, detailing Jamaica’s flora in the 18th century. Ashman explores the reductive reality of British environmental anthropology during the colonial period, in addition to how African Jamaicans were able to use their connections with their natural surroundings to gain autonomy over their health, spirituality and sexual wellbeing. The exhibition emphasises the forever intertwined realities of flora and black liberation, centred through resilience, growth, care and beauty. 👩🏾‍🎨 @jessica_a_ashman 📆 22nd Feb - 27th July 📍 Bristol Museum & Art Gallery

⭐️ @ellerustle investigates the power and setbacks posed by the black meme. Being used as a form of liberation through activism and education, or used to warp black bodies, stripping them of personhood and autonomy. Russell encourages us to politicise the black meme, to take up space in the digital, and therefore physical world as a way to assert our autonomy in the face of oppression. 💻 From the 1950’s postcards of black lynchings, to Michael Jackson’s thriller and gifs of dancing babies, the black meme is a window into a societies politics. Black life is not viewed as valuable, but a wearable mask or an obstacle to post-colonial hegemony. Black Meme promotes a new understanding of the images we see on a daily basis, an opportunity for radical change.

This Could All Be Yours! by British-American artist Danielle Dean, discusses an array of topics from neo-feudalism and urbanisation, to communal living and cultural visibility. Installation, film, paintings and scale models are used to interrogate each of these topics, enabling the viewer to step into the often-unsettling world Dean has created. The 2024 film, Hemel, is integral to the exhibition, following several fictitious and real intertwining narratives based in Dean’s rural hometown of Hemel Hempstead. The town was once the site of Britain’s optimistic post-war urban imagination, an optimism that was overshadowed by disaster, cultural intolerance and capitalism. Dean brings together elements of sci-fi and documentary, as well as intergenerational voices to discuss feelings of displacement, racialised identities and encroaching conglomerates which are actively impacting the area. This Could All Be Yours! is a plea to recognise the failures of society in the face of intolerance and greed. 👩🏽‍🎨 @danielledean 📆 8th Feb - 11th May 📍 Spike Island, Bristol

Thank you to all those who came through to the exhibition and launch night in honour of supporting black artists ✨🧑🏾‍🎨🫶🏾 It was a night filled with appreciation, connection, and empowerment 🌟 A special shout out to the artists, mentors as well as friends and family who helped to make this happen 🙌🏾 - @mahaliasobers