CLOWNS - An unfinished mini lecture
Samra Mayanja
Information
Time: 6pm
Tickets: Free – booking required
Running Time: 1 hour (no interval)
Age Recommendation: TBC
This presentation takes place in person in our Members Library
Photo Credit: Edward Saunders
“There is no better place to hide than within the confines of motherhood — a mask.” – Samra’s friend, Amanda Moström
CLOWNS centres a fictionalised mother–child relationship explored through clowning, mime, improvisation, and vocal experimentation. A series of unfinished mini-lectures that loosely explore a developing work titled CLOWNS, this presentation draws on a year of failed attempts to embody a clown that seems to stalk the artist, a brief trip to clown school, and a Cape Verdean carnival.
In CLOWNS, Samra engages with motherhood as a site of erasure and concealment, and considers inherited behaviours around shame and delusion. By placing clowning at the centre of this inquiry, Samra offers a voice that resists polish and respectability, embracing instability, risk and transformation.
This talk is part of Open Research: How to be Many Mothers?
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Biographies
Samra Mayanja
Samra Mayanja is an artist working across performance, installation, film and writing. Her practice considers the illegibility of the body and the absurdist impulse to seek what is irretrievably lost. A continuously hopeful but seemingly futile act of searching runs through her work and manifests in performances that blend improvisation, slapstick, poetic monologues and tender vocalisations. Samra’s practice sits between theatre, clown, and live art, shaped through performance in pubs, music venues, poetry nights, comedy stages, cabaret, theatres, and galleries. Her work is autobiographical, darkly comic, and formally unstable, foregrounding vulnerability, failure, and exposure as political and artistic tools.
Samra lives and works in London. Recent projects include Dead Dad Death Cult, Transmediale, Berlin (2025); Touch Me, Serf, Leeds (2024); All Islands Connect Underwater, CCA Glasgow (2023); The Living and the Stale, The Tetley, Leeds (2023); Bone Deep Deliverance (SCREAM II), LIVE Biennale, Western Front, Vancouver; scripted for a wayward narrator, London Short Film Festival (2022); and SWEAT, Somerset House, London (2021). Her pamphlet My Will and Testament (Never My Last) was recently published with If a Leaf Falls Press (2025). Mayanja is the founder of Black Cinema Project.
Access
PRE EVENT INFORMATION
This event takes place in person in our Members Library. This space is on the first floor, with step-free access via a lift.
If you have booked a ticket you will receive an email from us before the event detailing important information about your visit.
This event will be Relaxed. We invite you to make yourself comfortable and move around if you need to and if you need to leave the event at any point you will be allowed to return to the space when you feel ready.
Part of Open Research: How to be Many Mothers?
In an exciting new partnership with Kaaitheater (Brussels), BAC expands the Open Research programme with a curated series of talks, workshops and performances exploring mothering, family, and care beyond the norm.
This artistic research program offers multiple entry points, ranging from playful speculative thinking to the creation of new scenarios for (chosen) family dynamics. It shares imaginative strategies for combining (co-)parenting with artistic practice, while also challenging and unmasking idealized notions of motherhood.
Also part of Open Research: How to be Many Mothers?
25 Apr
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A workshop open to those interested in developing experimental dramaturgical tools or in exploring games as methods of artistic research.
25 Apr
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Sophie K. Rosa
In this talk, Sophie K. Rosa explores ideas about mothering, family, and how new ways of living together might be imagined and made.
28 - 29 Apr
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When You're Not Expecting
Louise Ashcroft
Artist Louise Ashcroft revisits her acclaimed autobiographical meltdown about turning 39 and realising she’s forgotten to have children.
2 May
Domestic Anarchism:
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Andrea Zavala Folache and Adriano Wilfert Jensen
Is it possible to both abolish the family and do group dancing?
2 May
Dynamic Families
Louise Ashcroft
In this workshop, Louise Ashcroft brings together elements of her ongoing artistic research into family, kinship, and relational dynamics.