Strategies of Play – Publication Launch

Bella Milroy is an artist, curator and researcher who lives in their hometown of Chesterfield, Derbyshire. They work responsively through mediums of sculpture, drawing, photography, text, writing, gardening and curating. They make work about making work (and being disabled) and not being able to make work (and being disabled). This process-based practice is fundamental to them as a disabled artist. They are 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 their work. 

They are passionate about disabled artists and their work, as well as advocating for better, more accessible and enjoyable working experiences for disabled artists. Examples of this are found in many of their curatorial projects such as Soft Sanctuary (2019-2021), Mob-Shop (2021), and Further Afield (2024). 

Their work was most recently featured in the Goldsmiths CCA exhibition, Flare-Up (2026). Their body of work, Popcorn Fur, was part of the duo exhibition, Languages of Intimacy (2025), commissioned by Grand Union. They are currently Researcher in Residence at Wysing Arts Centre, where they are carrying out their PhD research hosted in collaboration with Leicester University. Their research explores contemporary art practice, disability and access in rural spaces from 1989 to present.

Khairani Barokka (b. 1985) is an artist, writer, and filmmaker from Jakarta, based in London, whose work centres disability justice as anticolonial praxis, environmental justice, and access as translation. As part of her interdisciplinary work over the past 15 years, she’s been a UNFPA Indonesian Young Leader Driving Social Change, Delfina Foundation Associate Artist, Editor of Modern Poetry in Translation, Associate Artist at the UK’s National Centre for Writing, an Artforum Must-See, longlistee for the 2023 Loewe/Studio Voltaire Awards, and a shortlistee for the 2023 Asian Women of Achievement Awards. Okka has a PhD by Practice in Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths. She regularly judges and teaches for arts initiatives, and creates keynote artistic performances, video installations, and guest lectures, including for the Dada Rushton Lecture, Princeton and Oxford Universities, and elsewhere internationally. In 2026, Okka co-curated Paul Mellon Centre’s Disabled Legacies festival. Her latest artistic commission (2025) was ‘Kerokan Pol’, four short films directed in Jakarta for a duo show at Grand Union, and her fourth and fifth sole-authored books are both experimental translations: amuk (2024, longlisted for the Jhalak Poetry Prize) and prose debut Annah, Infinite (2025, The Bookseller Expert Pick; based on a 14-year art and writing project).