Image: Sila Sen
This session is part of (be)longing, a Bethlem Gallery project supporting artist and Arts & Health Hub Director Daniel Regan to explore the theme of belonging in the lead up to his solo exhibition at the gallery in spring 2026.
Join us for this online in-conversation event with 3 artists whose creative practices explore themes of migration and home, and gain insights into how their work explores the theme of belonging in different ways.
Alaa Alsaraji is a Newham-based visual artist and creative facilitator. Her practice involves working with community and school groups and is centred around the themes of belonging, reimagining space and community. She draws from her own experience of migration and displacement to connect on how universal feelings of ‘belonging’ and connectedness can be collectively expressed. She is the arts editor of Khidr Collective, a multidisciplinary artist collective creating platforms and spaces for young Muslim creatives through the annual Khidr Zine and online platform.
Sila Sen is a London-based multi-disciplinary artist, with a background in Sculpture from Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University in Istanbul, Turkey. The inspiration for her art comes from nature, light and emotions of living creatures and their relationships to their surroundings, their belongings, and the movement of all of these things in an endless cycle. Sila believes that the ever-changing nature of our existence (not just as humans, but the existence of all living and non-living beings and matter) provides enough questions to last many lifetimes, and that it is important to make time to observe the fleeting moments and to allow ourselves to ask questions. “It may be a brief idea, an emotion, a question, an image, or a long-lasting impression that I communicate with my art, and is open to change with the viewer, the creator, the surroundings and over time.”
Laura McDonagh is an award-winning second-generation Irish writer from the north-east of England. She writes about grief, social class and cultural identity. In 2023, Laura was the recipient of the Northern Writers Arvon Award. Her work has also been listed for the Life Writing Prize, Penguin WriteNow and the Fish Short Memoir Prize. Alongside writing, Laura runs Projecting Grief, a portraiture and storytelling project exploring the relationship between loss, creativity and healing, with photographer Jo Ritchie. Laura is currently working on a memoir called Commonplace. Capturing the nuanced and largely overlooked experience of being raised Irish in Britain, Commonplace is an intimate memoir about sudden loss, identity and the unexpected discovery that grief can be a catalyst for a more creative, fulfilling life. It is currently on submission to publishers.
Cost.
Free