Shama Khanna – Flatness

shama.khanna@flatness.eu / @shama_khanna / @flatness.eu /

she/ they

Shama Khanna is an independent curator, writer, educator and gardener from London. They are the founder of Flatness (http://flatness.eu), a long-running online platform for artists’ moving image and network culture invested in curating through a queer decolonial lens. The project has been described as a ‘digital site of resistance’ (Dr Sylvia Theuri), decentring narratives of the arts, technology and normalcy from the margins of the online.

As well as with the artists featured on the site, Khanna has collaborated with numerous publications and organisations including: documenta 14, Athens; NANG, Seoul; Moderna Museet, Malmö; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Western Front, Vancouver; Microscope, NYC; LIMA, Amsterdam; Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem; Art Monthly; Afterall; LUX Scotland; Jerwood Arts; Herbert Gallery; Camden Arts Centre; The Women’s Art Library, Goldsmiths; Feminist Review Journal; Chisenhale Gallery; Syllabus; and CCA, Glasgow (all UK). They have held teaching positions at Royal College of Art, Goldsmiths University of London and University of the Arts. Queer Diasporic Futurity edited by Flatness and developed in partnership with not/nowhere artist workers cooperative and researchers from Manchester Met University was published in July 2022. Currently, Flatness are curatorial residents at Forma HQ and Peveril Gardens, London. Khanna is Chair of the advisory Board for not/nowhere.

Selected writing and projects:

Flatness Interview for Spike Art Magazine

Non-linear screening series

Frida Orupabo exhibition review for Afterall

Dennis Cooper film review for The White Review

Vulnerability with Attitude (Overdue Dues) on the work of Hannah Catherine Jones.

Interview with Danielle Brathwaite Shirley published open source in Feminist Review.

Documentation of event showing visitors to the swap shop

swap shop logo with illustrated hands grabbing the letters 'w' and 'h'

About

Flatness is a multi-format research and commissioning project engaging in ideas around the screen-based image and immaterial culture after the internet. In inviting contributions by artists, writers and computer specialists the website flatness.eu seeks to test the possibilities and limitations of the web as a creative site and space for encountering artworks.

flatness.eu extends from the artists’ moving image programme ‘Flatness: Cinema after the Internet’ (featuring special screenings by artists Ed Atkins, Anthea Hamilton and Oliver Laric) curated for Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen 2013; returning to the small screen to present many of the works, research and writing about them, online.

Read an extended interview about the project in Rhizome.

Screening events and discussions relating to Flatness have taken place at international venues including Chisenhale Gallery, Auto Italia, Goldsmiths and The Showroom in London, Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Moderna Museet, Malmö, Western Front and Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver, The Alternative Film/Video Research Forum, Belgrade, Microscope, New York and Rupert, Vilnius, with more to come.

Currently, Flatness is working in collaboration with super_filme, Berlin to curate warehouse, a programme of online and offline screenings, workshops, digital residencies and ethnographic research and writing on digital friction.

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Flatness is curated by Shama Khanna

Web programming by intelligentsia and Reuben Bowles

Supported by Konstfack, Stockholm

All texts, works and images either belong to the artist, author or photographer named or are licensed under the terms of this CC 4.00 certificate.