Please join us for the launch of ‘Languages of Intimacy’, Bella Milroy and Khairani Barokka’s largest UK visual arts exhibition to date. Through the exhibition, the artists will explore interiority and play from two distinct sick-disabled perspectives, exploring the potential of illness and disability to facilitate intimacy in powerful and life-affirming ways, responding to existing in a world that does not value the presence of disabled people.
Join us at Birmingham School of Art (Margaret Street, B3 3BX) for a relaxed opening, there will be soft and alcoholic drinks served and there will be a quiet space available to take some time out. We ask that visitors don’t wear perfume or strong scents and we will have masks available should you wish to wear them. Staff will not be wearing masks so that those who lipread can see faces.
About the Artists
Bella MilroyOpen accordion
Bella Milroy is an artist and writer based in Sheffield. She works responsively through mediums of sculpture, drawing, photography, text, writing, gardening and curating. She makes work about making work (and being disabled) and not being able to make work (and being disabled). This process-based practice is fundamental to her as a disabled artist. She is continually motivated by concepts of public and private spaces and where the sick and/or disabled body exists within them, themes which emerge throughout much of her work.
‘Languages of Intimacy’ presents an expansion of Bella’s drawing practice.
She is passionate about contributing to the cataloguing of disabled artists, as well as advocating for better, more accessible and enjoyable working experiences for disabled artists across the industry. Examples of this are found in many of her curatorial projects such as Soft Sanctuary (2019-2021), Mob-Shop (2021), and Further Afield (2024). She was Artistic Associate at Level Centre, Rowsley, Derbyshire 2021-23.
Khairani BarokkaOpen accordion
Khairani Barokka (b. 1985) is a writer, artist, arts consultant, translator and editor from Jakarta. Khairani’s writing and art centres disability justice as anticolonial praxis. This often involves subverting expectations of formats such as captions—which in her work often takes the form of poetry, essays, and hybrid work—and practices such as translation. By focussing on affective flows of violence in colonial capitalism past and present, Khairani consistently links environmental and indigenous justice to disability justice, and to historical colonial archives and visual cultures, in the work. In particular, Khairani centres forms of disability justice that are rooted in Global South lived experiences, including her own.
Khairani regularly lectures, judges, mentors, and consults for arts organisations, and has a PhD by Practice in Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths, University of London, on an LPDP Scholarship, and a Masters from NYU Tisch School of the Arts, where she was a Departmental Fellow and Scholar. Her books include ‘Indigenous Species’ (Tilted Axis), ‘Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back’ (Nine Arches, as co-editor), ‘Rope’ (Nine Arches), ‘Ultimatum Orangutan’ (Nine Arches), shortlisted for the 2022 Barbellion Prize, and 2024’s ‘amuk’ (Nine Arches). Her nonfiction debut, ‘Annah, Infinite’, is forthcoming from Tilted Axis Press in 2025.
For ‘Languages of Intimacy’, Khairani will present time-based work in which Indonesian indigeneities and sick intimacies are juxtaposed in a surreal, playful manner with modernity and hypercapitalism.
‘Languages of Intimacy’ will take place alongside an expanded public programme in Autumn/Winter and is generously supported by Arts Council England, Paul Hamlyn Art Fund, The Elephant Trust, Shape Arts and DASH.