Selina Thompson’s salt. was acclaimed during the British Council Edinburgh Festival Showcase in 2017 and we are delighted this work was shown at Arts House in Melbourne as part of Next Wave Festival.
Selina Thompson is an artist and performer based in Leeds. Her practice is playful, participatory and intimate; focusing on the politics of identity and how this defines our bodies, lives and environments. With an emphasis on public engagement and a desire to connect to those who are often marginalised, she has made work for pubs, cafes, hairdressers, toilets, and sometimes even galleries and theatres.
salt. is a solo show about sorrow, ancestry, home, forgetting and colonialism. It's about the existence of colonial history in the everyday, the politics of grief and what happens inside Selina's head every time someone asks “where are you from?” and won't take Birmingham or her mum's uterus as an answer. Beautifully written, it charts the story of two artists who boarded a cargo ship and retraced one of the routes of the Transatlantic Slave Triangle, from the UK to Ghana to Jamaica and back. Developed during that three month voyage - and with artist collectives in Accra and Kingston – salt. is part of a wider body of work exploring Black identity.
Selina Thompson participated in a residency at Arts House in March 2018 and performed salt. as part of Next Wave Festival in Melbourne on 9-12 May 2018.