Onkar Singh Kular

Onkar Singh Kular is Professor of Design at HDK Valand, Academy of Art & Design, University of Gothenburg. His research is disseminated through exhibitions, programming, education and publications. He has guest-curated exhibitions for The Citizens Archive of Pakistan, Karachi, and the Crafts Council, UK. He was Stanley Picker Fellow in 2016, Artistic Director of Gothenburg Design Festival in 2017, Co-Artistic Director of Luleå Art Biennial in 2022 and curator of the sonic festival, Bass Cultures, How Low Can You Go! Falkenbergs teater, Sweden in 2023. He is the co-editor of Urgent Pedagogies Journal Issue #6, Earthed Imagination (2023) and Urgent Pedagogies Journal Issue #9, The Right to design (2024).

Housing Music Volume 2: A Mixtape Methodology

Through spoken word, moving collages and vinyl records Housing Music describes how Black and South Asian diasporas have made spaces, objects and broadcasting infrastructures within the sonic cultures of reggae, dub, bhangra, jungle and grime. In the UK and beyond, these sonic cultures have not only remapped geographies but have been inscribed into landscapes as a form of spatial, aural, material, and embodied evidence. As these inscriptions have largely been ignored by the field of design and architecture, to uncover this history requires alternative modes and cultures of researching, archiving and mediating.

Over the last years, I have been searching for these inscriptions by ‘digging in the crates’ of historical radio, TV, documentary interviews and vinyl records that sit outside of conventional design and architecture scholarship. Once inscriptions are edited, sampled and mix-taped they begin to build a counter archive of design experience and knowledge for other voices and perspectives within the canon of design and architecture history.

Volume 2 of Housing Music will focus on and depart from the home and house as a site of Black and South Asian creativity.