Past Disquiet: Panels

A discursive programme by Kristine Khouri and Rasha Salti

Date and Time:: Thursday 5 - Saturday 7 Feb 2026,
Various times

Taking place over three days, these panels consider the histories of solidarity and the arts in the UK linked to the four transnational struggles explored in Past Disquiet.

Panel 1: Festivals and Exhibitions in London

Thursday 5 February , 6:30-8:00pm

This panel focuses on the institutional practices of cultural spaces in London in the 1970s and 1980s. In particular, it will look at the festivals and exhibitions which took place in response to the Pinochet dictatorship and the Palestinian struggle.

Speakers: David Morris, Wing Chan

Panel 2: Solidarity for Chile and Nicaragua in the UK

Friday 6 February, 6:30-8:00pm

Focused on the work of artists and activists in the UK in support of Nicaragua and against the dictatorship in Chile, this panel pays attention to mural production and other cultural and artistic practices in the UK in the period of the mid-late 1970s and 1980s.

Speakers: Sebastian Bustamente, Holly Eva Ryan

Panel 3: Publishing and Archiving Movements and Struggles

Saturday February 7, 3:30-5pm

This panel focuses on the production of archives around the Free Palestine publication and the Anti-Apartheid Movement Archives. It will centre on the work of building archives and participating in movements, and look at the development of resources and tools to preserve and study the history of liberation struggles.

Speakers: Christabel Gurney, Sorcha Thomson, Rami Rmeileh

Rasha Salti is a researcher, writer, producer, and curator of art and film. She lives in Marseille.

Kristine Khouri is a researcher with a background in Arab cultural history and art history. Her interests focus on the history of art circulation, collection, exhibition, and infrastructure in the Middle East and North Africa, as well as archival practice and knowledge dissemination.

Sebastian Bustamante-Brauning is an artist, writer and curator specialising in photography and art from Latin America. Sebastian holds an AHRC funded PhD focused on digital memory platforms, and cultural and visual studies from Latin America (University of Bristol). He was the Assistant Director of the Essex Collection of Art from Latin America (2016-2018). His research interests include photography, museology, art history, digital heritage, human rights and memory in Latin America and the intersections between these areas.

Holly Eva Ryan

David Morris

Wing Chan

Christabel Gurney was a long-time activist in the Anti-Apartheid Movement, joining the campaign to stop the all-white Springbok rugby tour in 1969. She edited the AAM’s monthly newspaper, Anti-Apartheid News, in the 1970s. She has since researched and written about the history of the AAM and runs its ‘Forward to Freedom’ website: www.aamarchives.org. She is the Secretary of the Anti-Apartheid Movement Archives Committee and a member of the Advisory Council of the AAM’s successor organisation Action for Southern Africa (ACTSA).

Sorcha Thomson is a historian of tricontinental solidarities and ecologies. She is a Research Fellow within the Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts (SAVA) project at the University of East Anglia and a Teaching Fellow at SOAS and UCL. She is co-editor of the books She Who Struggles and Palestine in the World. Alongside Rami Rmeileh and Akram Salhab she has developed the digital teaching tool Free Palestine: British-Based Solidarities with the Palestinian Revolution.

Rami Rmeileh is a critical psychologist, researcher and critical pedagogue whose work centres Palestinian refugee histories, anti-colonial struggle, and the infrastructures of transnational solidarity. He is lead pedagogist at Makan Rights, an organiser with the European Centre for Palestine Studies, and currently completing a PhD in Middle East politics at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter.