Artist / Researcher
Through a research-led, materially grounded practice, Roo Dhissou interrogates how knowledge, memory, and authority are constructed across domestic, spiritual, and institutional spaces. Working with methods that include food, publishing, sculpture, installation, and dialogue, she challenges normative modes of engagement and calls for alternate ways of being with others.
I’m an artist, researcher, writer and publisher based in Birmingham. I make whatever I need to make. The work might become a room, a meal, a manji, a publication or a conversation, but the form comes after the question. I care about what happens around the work, whether people can gather, rest, speak honestly and take up space - I want people to be in the work and do the work with me.
Through practice, I enjoy learning and exchanging ideas. I believe there are no authoritative figures on knowledge, so through participation and engagement, my work sometimes facilitates discourse around race, gender, disability, social class, and their intersections. It’s not all the work, though, and, more importantly, it’s not always an easy conversation; conflict is necessary, and dialogue can create it. For me, facilitation and collaboration are about equity, not equality, about allowing others to take up space, rather than taking up space myself (sometimes it’s necessary, though).
My practice asks: How can conviviality foster reciprocal relationships with other art workers? How do we avoid or repair the bad relationships? How do we know the difference? How can we advocate for rest, slowness and saying no, whilst working to create space for ourselves and others? I’ve been calling this deep relationality. It means staying with people, materials and places long enough for something real to happen, and taking responsibility for the relationships the work produces. I’m interested in repair, but not in pretending art can heal a broken institution. For me, repair is accountability, access, aftercare and knowing when to return, or when to walk away.
My doctoral research is where my practice really came alive. For the past 6 years, I’ve been developing the concept of Cultural Dysphoria, a term I first encountered through Ayesha Sharma. It helps me think beyond cultural hybridity and the neat boxes placed around diasporic artists. Sometimes the mess forms a pattern; sometimes it falls apart again. I don’t need it to arrive at a solution. My work is messy, situated, and relational. I am thinking about Jalebi Entanglement, a term I coined myself.
Fred Moten views artists and their creative, improvisational practices as active producers of critical thought, famously blurring the line between making art and theorising - I see this as a crucial part of my practice. My research has allowed me to sow the first few seeds of a new generative theory built on the shoulders of many critical thinkers in feminism, critical race theory, social justice, disability, DIY, reparative and land justice, with multiple justice frameworks as entangled thought and practice. Jalebi Entanglement is the sticky, messy, looping and iterative parts of my practice.
Click on Experience if you want a CV, but the real value is in my research and process, which cannot be quantified in a CV, just saying.
If we aren’t recognised by institutions, we must recognise one another.
Image by Sancha