3 July – 20 August

Harold Offeh, Tai Shani and Maxwell Sterling join us in-residence across the summer. The three artists work across music, performance, installation and social arts practice and as part of their residencies will be contributing to events and study days.

Harold Offeh was born in Accra, Ghana and grew up in London. He works in a range of media including performance, video, photography, learning and social arts practice. Offeh often employs humour as a means to confront the viewer with historical narratives and contemporary culture and is interested in the space created by the inhabiting or embodying of history. He has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally. In 2017 he will be exhibiting as part of Untitled: art on the conditions of our time at New Art Exchange in Nottingham, UK and Tous, des sangs-mêlés at MAC VAL, Museum of Contemporary Art in Val de Marne, France. He lives in Cambridge and works in Leeds and London, UK.

Tai Shani's multidisciplinary practice, comprising performance, film and installation, revolves around experimental narrative texts. These alternate between familiar narrative tropes and structures and theoretical prose in order to explore the construction of subjectivity, excess and affect and the epic in relation to post-patriarchal realism. Shani's ongoing feminist project, Dark Continent Productions, is iterated through character-led installations, films, performances and experimental texts, is an expanded adaptation of Christine de Pizan's 1405 pioneering proto-feminist book, ‘The Book of the City of Ladies’. Shani has presented her work in the UK and abroad, including Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm, Serpentine Galleries, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, Southbank Centre, London, Arnolfini, Bristol, Matt’s Gallery, London and FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais and Loop Festival, Barcelona. Shani is based in London.

Maxwell Sterling is a composer and musician whose work ranges from film soundtracks to live performance, studio albums to ballet scores. With a background in jazz improvisation and film music, his work is often focused on how music is used as a mode of communication and signifier of emotions. In 2016, he released his debut album, ‘Hollywood Medieval’ which explores the role of synthesis and digital sounds and their effect on us emotionally. Sterling collaborated with artist Linder and curator Kathy Noble on Art Night 2016, Destination Moon, You must not look at her! which featured a live tableaux of dancers, two choirs, a string ensemble and two drummers. Sterling currently works between Los Angeles and the UK. Listen on Soundcloud here.