The Second Annual Maud Sulter Lecture with Pratibha Parmar
4.30pm Friday 31st October 2025
Reid Lecture Theatre, Glasgow School of Art
Free but ticketed - Book Here
Pratibha Parmar met Maud in the mid 1980’s during a time many of us outside the mainstream arts establishment were committed to growing a vibrant Black women’s arts movement. Their work as painters, photographers and moving image artists criss-crossed thematically, and they generated bodies of visual narratives contesting erasures and mapped out our visions for a different kind of world. Parmar will talk about these foundational moments in dialogue with Sulter’s work and their reverberations today.
As well as the lecture, Pratibha will also be hosting a salon at Glasgow Women's Library (GWL) specifically to support emerging women of colour creatives in a relaxed and informal environment. Please see GWL website for more details and to find out how to register interest.
More information on Pratibha Parmar
Pratibha Parmar’s films have shaped the politics of feminist, queer, and diasporic visual cultures for over four decades. From experimental shorts to activist documentaries and feature-length works, Parmar’s cinematic language operates as an act of visual justice. Her practice engages the image as a site of struggle—challenging the power relations that determine who is seen, how they are represented, and what forms of visual expression are made possible. Her films are a site of narrative transformation, where memory, activism, and artistic expression converge to resist erasure and imagine new futures.
In 2024/2025, Parmar’s two films, Sari Red and Reframing AIDS were included in the groundbreaking Women In Revolt exhibition at Tate Britain. From July to September 2025, ICA London is presenting in conjunction with Connecting Thin Black Lines 1985–2025, curated by Lubaina Himid, a season of Parmar’s films. A joint publication between ICA and Sming Sming Books titled, Our Eyes as Commonly Tender: Visual Justice in the Filmmaking of Pratibha Parmar will be launched on 3rd September 2025
About the Annual Maud Sulter Lecture
The Maud Sulter Lecture aims to amplify the legacy of artist Maud Sulter , her roots in Scotland, and the internationalism of her practice as an artist, photographer, writer, poet, curator, and organiser. From the mid-1980s until she died in 2008, Maud strove to place Black women at the centre of an art history that had excluded them. She also challenged Western art, denouncing the erasure faced by the African diaspora. The first Lecture took place in June 2024 with poet, playwright and novelist Jackie Kay.
This annual event is a partnership between Glasgow Women's Library, Street Level Photoworks and Glasgow School of Art Exhibitions and Glasgow School of Art Fine Art Critical Studies.
Banner Image: June Jordan & Angela Davis in Pratibha Parmar’s film A Place of Rage (1991)
© Pratibha Parmar
Left Image: Portrait of Pratibha Parmar © Shaheen Haq
