We're very excited to announce the Associate-led Public Programme 2026 - Towards the Edges 🔦 Please visit the link in our bio to read more about all of the events and book tickets today!
About the Programme:
Open School East (OSE) is a free, independent art school located at 39 Hawley Square, Margate. OSE’s Associates Programme hosts a group of artists for one year, biannually, to think, make and learn together and near each other. Now in our second term, we invite you to a multidimensional events programme taking place throughout Margate. This event series emerges from our individual and collective interests, and in response to this year’s curriculum: processes of co-learning; resistance to and reassembly of power structures; and connection through language and sound. Across sonic experiences, collaborative making, artist talks, and subversive cinema, the programme will call you to move Towards the Edges—further from categorisation, and closer to improvisation and uncertainty.
Towards the Edges is organised and led by OSE’s Associates 2026: Milly Aburrow, Serena Mirambeau Brey, Hannah Chaney, Annabelle Edginton, Ffion Colquhoun-O’Brien, Ezekiel, Clara Frain-Atallah, Imogen Naomi Herd, Eve Jefferies, Suds McKenna, Cara Murray, Dre Spisto, Helen Savage and Awra Tewolde-Berhan.
We’re excited to announce our continued partnership with Turner Contemporary who are generously hosting part of the programme, and we look forward to presenting events at Cliftonville Community Centre and Ark, Cliftonville.
You can find more Public Programme events at: openschooleast.org/public-programme-2026
Upcoming public event – 'listening, listening, images’ – a sound and vocal workshop with Sophie Mak Schram
🗓️ Saturday 16 May, 2-4pm
📍ARK, Cliftonville CT9 2HP
🎟️ FREE, booking required
This workshop explores listening as a critical and performative practice through Tina Campt’s Listening to Images (2017). Using lecture par arpentage—a reading method developed in workers’ circles for collective education—we will approach the text collaboratively, fragmenting and sharing its ideas through group discussion and vocal interpretation. Drawing on this shared reading, we will then work together to create a recorded sonic lecture, experimenting with voice, sound, and collective listening.
Sophie Mak Schram works across art, art historical research and radical pedagogies. They engage others in place-specific work around power, collectivity, knowledges and futures. This work is informed by personal and shared experiences of cultural difference, coloniality, race and gender. Often using the metaphor of the 'tool' - as a poetic and practical object - Sophie works with collaborators to make tools that can shift power, gather groups and offer ways of being in relation (to each other, to place, to institutions) differently.
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This event is organised by OSE Associate Suds McKenna, and is part of ‘Towards the Edges’, Open School East’s Public Programme 2026 – find more events: openschooleast.org/public-programme-2026
Image: Still from collective reading with Iliada Charalambous for Change Feeling at Van Abbemuseum, July 2022. Photo by Ozgur Atlagan
Join us for – My beautiful side of the archive – a listening session with Palestinian Sound Archive
🗓️ Saturday 2 May, 2-4pm
📍ARK, Cliftonville CT9 2HP
🎟️ FREE, booking required (link in bio)
Palestinian Sound Archive is a celebration of music, spoken word and album artwork from historic Palestine, mainly from the 1960s – 1990s. It is part of Majazz Project, a Palestinian-led record label and research platform founded by actor, director and filmmaker Mo’min Swaitat in 2020.
Over several years, Swaitat amassed an extensive archive of cassettes, reel and vinyl records from Palestine and beyond, spanning everything from field recordings of Bedouin weddings to revolutionary albums from the First and Second Intifadas, instrumental tracks, poetry, soul, folk songs and jazz.
This event explores archival practice as a decolonial methodology and act of resistance, through sharing archival sounds and images that preserve and document Palestinian heritage, culture and resistance. This listening session features sounds from the Majazz Project, Palestinian Sound Archive and friends.
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This event is organised by OSE Associate Dre Spisto, and is part of ‘Towards the Edges’, Open School East’s Public Programme 2026 – find more events: openschooleast.org/public-programme-2026
Sound support from @reflectivehands 👏 Big thanks to @steeplespeoples and @krislock_ for generously providing tech for the event.
“Building an art school for the future” Today feels like an important day.
I had the chance to share with the associates at @openschooleast and revisit the core principles of my practice.
In moments of transformation, it becomes necessary to return to the center, to touch what really matters and open it to others.
I feel very grateful and proud to be part of this program.
@openschooleast has been a reference in my path for a long time, and now we begin to walk together.
Working with carnival is a continuous transformation and some times It asks strongly us to pause, to look again, and to reimagine what is essential.
Thank you to Polly Brannan sister, friend, and director of OSE for holding this space with such care.
And you, my dear follower and friend, take a moment to look at what Open School East @openschooleast is doing. There is something real there.
With expectation for what is coming,
and with the hand raised for social transformation.
See you soon, mates.
Join us on Saturday 25 April, 5-8pm to make Open Wave-Receivers with Shortwave Collective!
The workshop is free but booking is essential.
Facilitated by OSE Associates Serena Mirambeau Brey and Awra Tewolde-Berhan
When? Saturday 25 April, 5-8pm
Where? Open School East, Margate CT9 1NY
Work with Shortwave Collective member Alyssa Moxley to learn about and build a simple homemade radio receiver, an ‘Open Wave-Receiver’. Participants will be engaged as co-researchers and experimenters, working with a basic set of materials.
Following the construction of our DIY Open Wave-Receivers, we’ll explore the local area together, searching for signals and attaching our radios to metal structures as makeshift antennas, incorporating urban fixtures into the radio circuit.
This workshop is open to all ages and levels of experience for people with an interest in sound and electronics.
Shortwave Collective is an international feminist group using the electromagnetic spectrum as artistic material. Shortwave Collective deliver workshops nationally and internationally, constructing open and untunable radio receivers that connect the listener to a fusion of natural radio emissions and human-generated transmissions.
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This event is part of Towards the Edges, Open School East's Public Programme 2026 - find more events: openschooleast.org/public-programme-2026
Image 1 by Hannah Kemp Welch
Image 2 by Alyssa Moxley
image 3 by Morgan Bodart
Join us for 'Who writes the score?', a sound and scoring workshop with Shamica Ruddock
🗓️ Weds 8 April, 6:00-7:30pm
📍Turner Contemporary, CT9 1HG
🎟️ FREE, booking required (link in bio)
Working in a small group alongside artist and composer Shamica Ruddock, participants will explore the process of sounding and note taking in a collectively held space where anything (and everything) can be a sound.
Using a variety of DIY instruments and notational and drawing techniques, we will map a journey together and reflect on our sonic curiosities; exploring how our connections to and memories of sound shift and envelope in communal spaces.
No previous technical or musical knowledge required.
This event is organised by OSE Associates Hannah Chaney and Annabelle Edginton, and is part of Towards the Edges, Open School East's Public Programme 2026.
Working across film, installation and live performance, Shamica Ruddock is an artist and a composer whose experiments in sound are informed by a core investment in sound as a site for knowledge production.
Previously an Open School East Associate Artist, Shamica Ruddock shares sound based research project ‘Re-Imagining In-Conversation’ with fellow Open School East alumni Hannan Jones. Presentations include Silent Green (DE), Savvy Contemporary (DE), Madeira Dig (PT), and Oscillation (BE). Together they are currently artists in residence with Wysing Arts Centre Cambridge, supported by Forma and Knotenpunkt.
💧Porous histories, fluid pictures💧with Despacito Art School, Samara Scott and OSE Associates
As part of our new peer-to-peer sessions at Open School East, artist Samara Scott led a 3 day workshop with Despacito Art School and our current cohort of Associates during February half term.
Through a process-led and experimental approach to arts education, the group collectively explored ideas of liquidity, amphibious-ness and abstract alchemy to create a suspended underwater puppet worlds that reflected the groups connections to the (un)seen worlds around us.
Following two days of making, and daily tea readings, the Associates supported Despacito in developing their own DIY stop-motion animations using the underwater worlds and explored the process of "film painting".
The group will continue to develop the collaborative work further and present this collective artwork during our Summer Exhibition, running 18 - 21 June 2026.
#savethedate
Join my next ritual at @turnercontemporary with @openschooleast for 𝘚𝘌𝘈𝘕𝘊𝘌𝘚 𝘣𝘺 𝘙𝘐𝘌𝘒𝘖: 𝘙𝘦𝘣𝘪𝘳𝘵𝘩 – an electro-acoustic sound bath and automatic writing workshop on 14/3
We’re sold out, but if you’re making the trip to Margate without a ticket, DM me and arrive early (before noon)
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In preparation for the Spring Equinox – a symbol of renewal, transformation, and spiritual balance – participants will be guided on a journey designed to awaken their intuition and creative potential, connecting past, present, and future selves through a collective experience
Set on the ground floor of Turner Contemporary with the ocean as a backdrop, RIEKO shares the rituals behind her own multi-disciplinary practice, including the channeled music of her upcoming EP 𝘡𝘢𝘬𝘶𝘳𝘰
Details linked in bio
This event is part of @openschooleast ’’s 2026 Associates Programme “Towards the Edges,” organised by OSE Associates @ezekielarchive and @helen.margaret91
Photo shot in Margate by @lucyfengofficial
Huge thank you to everyone that made it out to the first #publicprogramme event last week ꩜꩜ and to @jessedarling and to our Associates @clarahweii and @caracmurray for facilitating the evening!
Please visit the link in our bio to find out more about the programme and book tickets for upcoming events today
🔦
Associate-led Public Programme 2026: Towards the Edges
OSE’s Associates Programme hosts a group of artists for one year, biannually, to think, make and learn together and near each other. Now in our second term, we invite you to a multidimensional events programme taking place throughout Margate. This event series emerges from our individual and collective interests, and in response to this year’s curriculum: processes of co-learning; resistance to and reassembly of power structures; and connection through language and sound. Across sonic experiences, collaborative making, artist talks, and subversive cinema, the programme will call you to move Towards the Edges—further from categorisation, and closer to improvisation and uncertainty.
Towards the Edges is organised and led by OSE’s Associates 2026: Milly Aburrow, Serena Mirambeau Brey, Hannah Chaney, Annabelle Edginton, Ffion Colquhoun-O’Brien, Ezekiel, Clara Frain-Atallah, Imogen Naomi Herd, Eve Jefferies, Suds McKenna, Cara Murray, Dre Spisto, Helen Savage and Awra Tewolde-Berhan.
We’re excited to announce our continued partnership with Turner Contemporary who are generously hosting part of the programme, and we look forward to presenting events at Cliftonville Community Centre and Ark, Cliftonville.
#Upcoming
Symposium: In-conversation with Jesse Darling
🗓️ Wednesday 25 February, 6-7:30pm
📍 Cliftonville Community Centre, Margate CT9 2DB
🎟️ FREE entry, Booking required
Join OSE Associates Clara Frain-Atallah (@clarahweii ) and Cara Murray (@caracmurray ), alongside artist and Turner Prize winner Jesse Darling, for an open group conversation inspired by the classical symposium—a shared space where ideas are exchanged, tested, and reshaped collectively.
The conversation will draw on themes central to Jesse’s current practice and interests, including materials that carry both physical and symbolic weight; systems of care, control, and neglect; and the structures—architectural, institutional, and linguistic—that shape how we live together.
Jesse Darling is an artist who writes, lives, and works. His research is concerned with the attempt to make visible the unconscious of European petro-colonial modernity through the history of technology and the production of ideology, or the objects and ideas with which we make up the world.
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This event is part of 'Towards the Edges', Open School East's Public Programme 2026 - more at: openschooleast.org/public-programme-2026 (link in bio)
Views from the basement and garden, as part of 'Give Ground', Open School East's annual open studios, devised by our current cohort of Associates.
Give Ground presents research and new works that respond to OSEs current programme cycle, 'Home is where the garden is', and reflects shared artistic inquiries into civic space, materiality, and site-specificity.
Give Ground is developed in collaboration with artist and researcher Hugh Nicholson.
Photos by @ezekielarchive
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Find out more about Open School East’s current Associate cohort and our current programming cycle, ‘Home is where the garden is’, via the links in our bio.
OSE Associates:
Milly Aburrow, Serena Mirambeau Brey, Hannah Chaney, Ffion Colquhoun-O’Brien, Annabelle Edginton, Ezekiel, Clara Frain-Atallah, Imogen Naomi Herd, Eve Jefferies, Suds McKenna, Cara Murray, Dre Spisto, Helen Savage and Awra Tewolde-Berhan
