On October 10, the Irish Writers Centre will host what promises to be a powerful workshop on Art, Activism and Representation, led by two incredible facilitators; Emily Waszak and Evgeny Shtorn.

This online workshop will explore crucial and challenging questions around the ethics of representation and related tensions between art and activism. The issue of representation is made additionally complicated by observing the intersectional perspectives where the artist must simultaneously think about themselves in terms of their own class, race, gender and sexuality alongside that of the community within which they are working. This workshop will address these interrelated topics, examining the overlapping contradictions between activism and art.

For more information, you can visit the Irish Writers Centre website here.

(This workshop is free for those who are currently unwaged. For those who can afford the ticket price, you are asked to contribute either €20 or €50 to support the payment of the facilitators on the programme.)

The facilitators of the workshop are Evgeny Shtorn, a writer, activist, and researcher from St Petersburg. Due to his involvement in civil society work he was forced to leave Russia in 2018. In 2019, he was granted international protection in the Republic of Ireland. He currently works as a Social and Cultural Diversity Consultant collaborating with different universities and NGO’s, (NUI Galway, UCD, Equality Fund at Rethink Ireland, Create – National Development Agency for Collaborative Arts.

Evgeny’s writing has been published in academic journals, anthologies and new media outlets in Russia, Spain, Germany, and Ireland. As an activist, he has been involved in human rights and LGBT advocacy for almost two decades. He is a co-founder of Queer Diaspora Ireland, an initiative that supports LGBT+ people in direct provision. In 2020, Shtorn was awarded the GALAS Person of the Year by the National LGBT Federation of Ireland (NXF).

Emily Waszak is a long-time anti-racist organiser and abolitionist originally from North Carolina. She is a founding member of MERJ (Migrants and Ethnic-minorities for Reproductive Justice), a grassroots group committed to making space for radical, affected-led political analysis from migrant and ethnic minority women, trans and non-binary people and fighting for reproductive justice in Ireland.

Emily works as a textile artist and is a former recipient of the Arts Council’s Artist in the Community Research and Development Award with Create. Her current work focuses on disrupting the white gaze and collective grief.