Our Director Sophie on the (be)longing Conference

Excerpt from Bethlem Gallery Director, Sophie Leighton’s introduction to the (be)longing Conference. The (be)longing conference (25 March 2025) was part of a programme curated by Daniel Regan leading to his solo exhibition in 2026. 

Belongingness 

Why is a focus on belonging important now?   

I hope and know that in the audience are many artists, and people interested in the role of culture. As we know, art and culture plays a vital role in helping us to make sense of ourselves, of our world; our histories and futures. We’re living in difficult and frightening times of war, polarisation, big egos and shrinking social provision. Belonging seems an important way to address this with hope.   

At the moment in my spare time, I’m reading a lot and attempting to write a phd – which is both a challenge and a joy. As a student, I’ve learnt about different ways of constructing worlds, of ‘worlding’. I’ve been thinking about knowledge as every good student has to do: how it is made and what makes it important? What kinds of knowledge do we need? How does knowledge feed power?   

I’ve been drawn to feminist thinkers like Donna Haraway, Sonia Harding and bell hooks who advocate for situated knowledges – not broad sweeping neutral claims but the importance of very specific, lived experiences. This is something that artists know all about of course. Knowledge that belongs to a specific time, place, culture and experience.   

One method of gathering knowledge is through what academics – particularly anthropologists – call thick description. By thick description they mean long descriptive and complex texts about specific experiences, events, and contexts, where meanings are multilayered. Art practices are of course similar: complicated, connected, situated.  

The implications of this complex and thick situatedness are useful – to start with the fact that everything is connected; everyone is connected. Recently this way of framing knowledge and relationships has incorporated the climate emergency, advocating for humans to see themselves as part of the world on equal terms with the natural world. To incorporate and acknowledge – cherish -and live with – the more than human.   

This is about belonging in the most expansive sense. Planetary belonging. Academics like Donna Haraway advocate being-with, making-with – and making kin.   

With the term ‘making kin’ Haraway is talking about having a strong ethical accountability of care with others. And by this she is not advocating for families in a nuclear sense – her slogan is make kin, not babies.   

She is urging people to make their choices, to make their kin. Her argument is that we have to make-with and not focus on the self – that we only exist ethically (and ontologically) with others. And in doing that in the present we will have a better future. She writes about this, drawing worldly crises into her argument:   

“The task is to make kin in lines of inventive connection as a practice of learning to live and die well with each other in a thick present. Our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places.”  

Haraway invites us to stay in the present, to stay with the trouble. She argues that  

“…staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings.”  

(Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble : Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Duke University Press, 2016, p.2)  

What is useful in the context of today, is that this framing gives us a way in to use belonging, an exploration and sense of belonging and draw on an ethics of belongingness. This framing gives us a way of using belonging to work with an awareness of who we are and how we are situated, and who we have – and who we choose to have – responsibilities and accountabilities towards – to be with, to make kin: to belong with. Belonging – in these many senses – becomes a way in which we can tackle and live with what is going on in the world today.   

Artists and arts organisations can support and enact this process – with a focus on deep explorations of situatedness and an ethics of belongingness. At Bethlem Gallery for nearly 30 years now we’ve attempted this – we’ve worked with artists to make trouble but also to settle troubled waters. Arts organisations are good at being and being-with, at making kin. We’re experienced at working with thick description – at seeing multiple layers and contexts, focusing on situated experiences, meeting people where they are. There is very little opportunity for black and white ways of being or understanding.    

Last year we were picketed for holding an event at the gallery to celebrate Pride. We discovered that protesters objected not to the pride event itself but to the fact we were holding a celebration of queer identities, of belongingness, at Bethlem Gallery, on the site of a mental health hospital – the oldest psychiatric hospital in the world – which some experience as a site of harm.    

We can think of this event – of the pride celebration – as a way of staying with the trouble, to borrow Haraway’s words again. An activist, positive and potent response to a difficult reality. A celebration of belonging in a world – and in a context – that can often – through being part of a system – negate belonging and pathologise specific experiences.   

Bethlem Gallery and the artists we work with can’t untangle ourselves from an association with, a belonging within, a hospital site – but we can live with it, alongside it – we make kin – artists, gallery and hospital staff, whom we hold accountable and who likewise hold us accountable. Sometimes that is uncomfortable, but for those choosing to be part of it, it is all part of the ethics of belonging, of belonging-with. For many it is a hopeful and necessary thing.   

As I hope I’ve argued, art has a role to play in the ethics and practice of belongingness. It is a way of coping with and staying with the trouble. Belonging – making kin, being with, caring for, making accountable – can be a radical act and a way to resist and counter some of the big things happening today.  

Read more about the (be)longing programme and exhibition here.