Olivia Douglass: Ordinary Dreams

The year 2022 marks the 50th anniversary of the repeal of a law that prohibited sexual acts between men 50 years ago, effectively decriminalising being gay in Norway.

Kunsthall Stavanger honours Queer Culture Year with a new digital project consisting of four commissioned works by Nat Pyper, Olivia Douglass, virgil b/g taylor and Zutana Hadaddeen. The works will be presented as interactive projects on our digital platform, with the first launching in December 2022, and the others to follow in March, May and September 2023.

The title for the project, Even When We Can't We Must, is borrowed from a work by Nat Pyper bearing the same name.

Olivia Douglass is a British-Nigerian writer, poet and artist, living in London. They are the winner of the Guardian and 4th Estate 4thWrite Prize 2022 with their story 'Ink'. They are the author of Slow Tongue, a verse/lyric-essay hybrid that responds to M. NourbeSe Philip’s She Tries Her Tongue Her Silence Softly Breaks. Their writing appears in publications including Bath Magg, Nothing Personal, Prototype 2, and they wrote the foreword for Away With Word vol.4. A Barbican Young Poets Alumna, Olivia has been commissioned by the National Poetry Library (London) and Galleria Duarte Sequeira (Portugal), alongside curating reading rooms for Passa Porta Festival (Brussels) and Nottingham Contemporary. They have held residencies with Talawa Theatre Company and Theatre Peckham, been shortlisted for the Rebecca Swift Foundation’s Women Poet Prize 2020, and in 2021 was longlisted for a Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship. Olivia was the curator of Strange Echoes, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London) in 2022, a six-day Black experimental poetry convening. Olivia is currently an MSt Creative Writing Student at the University of Oxford and is working on their first novel.