Alina Khakoo is a PhD student on the Criticism and Culture programme at Cambridge University, supervised by Priyamvada Gopal, Amy Tobin and Shamira Meghani. Her thesis looks at South Asian diasporic artmaking in 1980s Britain, across the contexts of art education, art publishing, archives, and the display of art, thinking through concepts of group work, DIY artmaking, and the relations between politics and aesthetics.
Alongside her PhD, Alina has worked on the Curatorial team at Kettle’s Yard, assisting the exhibitions Linderism (2020), Untitled (2021) and Sutapa Biswas (2021–22). She also works as a Library Volunteer at Tate, where she catalogues the Panchayat Special Collection. Her publications include the book chapter ‘Reading Between the Texts: On Kali (1984)’, in Lumen: Sutapa Biswas, Cambridge, London and Newcastle: Kettle’s Yard, Ridinghouse and BALTIC, 2021. She has taught as a guest lecturer and supervisor in the Faculty of History of Art and the Faculty of English at Cambridge, and has co-facilitated events such as the Kali Student Reading Group with Lola Olufemi (2021); the Decolonising the Archive workshop with Samia Malik of the Women of Colour Index Reading Group (2021); and seminars for the Postcolonial and Related Literatures Postgraduate Research Seminar series at Cambridge, which she has co-convened since 2019.
