Mapping Memory with Participatory Art Practices
Date: Wednesday 15th April 2026
Time: 16:00-18:00
Location: The Willow, Room B
Description:
We’re delighted to announce the next event in our Inaugural Lecture Series, featuring Professor Nela Milic, Professor of Arts Practice, who will present her lecture Mapping Memory with Participatory Art Practices.
This lecture will explore Professor Milic’s practice-based research approach to memory, examining how both personal and collective memories shape our everyday lives and identities.
Through examples from her artistic practice, Nela will demonstrate how participatory and multimedia art methods help people remember, recollect and reflect on their past. Her work engages deeply with themes of memory, trauma, placemaking and belonging, particularly in contexts where identity is shaped by marginalisation or living on the edges of dominant cultural narratives.
The lecture will also highlight her auto-ethnographic research, showing how it expands the boundaries of visual culture, feminist practice and critical studies, and why these approaches are essential to understanding how communities form and sustain themselves.
By the end of the session, attendees will gain fresh insights into how art practice can illuminate complex social themes such as identity, participation, archives and collective memory.
Professor Milic’s research focuses on the intersection of time and space, leading to numerous practice-based, interdisciplinary projects exploring memory, archives, activism, placemaking, participation and East European art. Her work has been presented in major international contexts, including the Olympic Stadium in London and the Venice Biennale, where she contributed to Vlatka Horvat’s project By the Means at Hand for the Croatian Pavilion in 2024.
Her work is also held in the collection of Belgrade’s Cultural Centre in Serbia, and she has delivered projects for organisations including the Royal Opera House, Barbican, Arts Council England, John Lewis, Al Jazeera, Campbell Works, the Oxo Tower, LIFT, the London Film Festival and the Refugees and the Arts Initiative. She is a recipient of the European Cultural Foundation Artistic Grant for the project Wedding Bellas and received the Southwark Community Arts Award for Here Comes Everybody in 2015.
About the Inaugural Lecture Series
Inaugural lectures celebrate the research excellence and achievements of academics who have been awarded the distinguished title of Professor.
They offer the University community an opportunity to come together to recognise colleagues and learn more about the impact of their work.
Access infomation:
The Willow is accessible, on the ground floor and has accessible toilets nearby.
You will be sent all relevant information 2-3 days before the event, if you do not reply to this email by the date stated, your place will go to someone on the waiting list.
To book your ticket, please follow this link: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/mapping-memory-with-participatory-art-practices-with-professor-nela-milic-tickets-1852044066659?aff=oddtdtcreator