Open Call

The Raspberry Pi Foundation and Wysing Arts Centre are inviting applications from artists to participate in a part-time, six month residency, embedded with two Cambridge-based organisations at the leading edge of creativity and innovation. 
Both organisations share a commitment to inclusivity and creative learning and, through this collaboration, we are looking to support an artist to develop their work and to help us gain new perspectives that can inform our own practice.

The residency will provide the selected artist with the chance to: 

- Explore and take risks without the expectation of developing new work. 
- Experiment with new approaches, materials and technologies.
- Embed themselves with two unique organisations and engage with their communities.

The residency will suit an artist with an interest in digital technology, although you don't need to use digital technologies as your medium. We are particularly interested in artists who are interested in exploring the intersection between technology, inclusion, and young people.

DEADLINE: 9 October

Download an application pack here.

APPLY HERE

We are thrilled to launch our residency programme for 2023–24. This year’s programme reflects our mission to cultivate the freewheeling imagination and to support ideas and practices that shape the world. At the heart of this year’s residencies, commissions and youth programming is our thinking about how we can use our resources and unique site as equitably and ethically as possible, opening the organisation to wider audiences and bringing new voices into our programme. 

We are delighted to announce that in 2023-24 we will host artist residencies with Intoart (Clifton Wright, Nancy Clayton and Dawn Wilson), Rudy Loewe, Fiona MacDonald, Wet Mess, Bella Milroy, Joe Namy, Daniel Oduntan, Sean Roy Parker, Belladonna Paloma, Diana Puntar, Charwei Tsai and Murphy Yum. 

In recent years we have reviewed our use of open calls to consider approaches to programming that are less reliant on unpaid artist labour. Working with a network of advisors made up of Wysing alumni, we are making efforts to bring new voices into our programmes. Our 2023 Advisory Group includes Uma Breakdown, Cédric Fauq, Tammy Reynolds and Akil Scafe-Smith. 

Our 2023 residencies are supported by Arts Council England and many are organised in partnership: Charwei Tsai’s residency has been jointly invited with Kettle’s Yard and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in advance of the exhibition Making New Worlds: Li Yuan-chia and friends at Kettle’s Yard (11 November 2023-18 February 2024); Belladonna Paloma in partnership with Vital Capacities; Murphy Yum's residency is supported by Knotenpunkt, with additional support from Flat Time House. 

Biographies 

Intoart: Clifton Wright, Nancy Clayton, Dawn Wilson 

Intoart is a pioneering visual arts organisation championing its founding vision for ‘people with learning disabilities to be visible, equal & established artists and designers’.  

Intoart’s studio is located in the heart of Peckham and has been embedded within the communities of South London for the past 23 years. Founded in 2000, by Ella Ritchie and Sam Jones, the full time studio programme spans art, design & craft and is an alternative art school for people with learning disabilities to develop a long-term creative practice. 

Three artists from Intoart will be spending time at Wysing in 2023.  

Clifton Wright has pursued portraiture for over a decade, from the beginning the faces in his drawings have been woven into and enmeshed with tessellations of abstract shapes. Working most recently from life, his drawn portraits build as a series, made in response to family albums, art books and exhibitions, characters from science fiction, film, and popular culture.

https://intoart.org.uk/artist/clifton-wright/ 

Nancy Clayton’s large scale drawings are informed by her experience and observation of the body in motion. These complex figurative compositions balance the weight and momentary flight of the body while also capturing the emotional intensity shared through performance. 

https://intoart.org.uk/artist/nancy-clayton/ 

Dawn Wilson’s drawings of night life and street life in Kinshasa and Bamako were selected for New Contemporaries 2022 including exhibitions at Humber Street Gallery, Hull and South London Gallery. She is committed to monochrome and uses graphite, charcoal dust applied with a brush, white pencil, and an eraser. 

https://intoart.org.uk/artist/dawn-wilson/ 

Rudy Loewe (b. 1987) visualises Black histories and social politics through painting, drawing and text. They began a Techne funded practice-based PhD at the University of the Arts London in 2021, critiquing Britain’s role in suppressing Black Power organising in the English-speaking Caribbean, during the 60s and 70s. Loewe is creating paintings and drawings that unravel this history included in recently declassified Foreign & Commonwealth Office records. Their approach to painting speaks to their background in comics and illustration — combining text, image and sequential narrative.  

Fiona MacDonald works with human and nonhuman beings as Feral Practice to create art projects that develop ethical and imaginative connection across species boundaries. They work to expand relationality, explore diverse aesthetics and foreground distinctive creaturely subjectivities. Often people set up divisions between species, and between different categories of knowledge and understanding, Feral Practice works and converses across these barriers. Their vulnerable, speculative approach brings experimental art into spaces of care and attentiveness for and with real, situated beings.  

Wet Mess is a wet mess, horny for your confusion. Let it all out and guess again at the insecure balding white man/pussy prince/alien baby. Have a lollygag, think about your fantasy flesh suits, call me sweet prince, and remember Roger in a robe. Choose to make some silly campy decisions, with all the hairy thems and dykey men. Mainly thinking about cunnilingus cunni cunni lingus but also being more unknown than known. All I really wanna do is strip for the stripper and drive her home with the dogs. 

Bella Milroy is an artist and writer who lives in her hometown of Chesterfield, Derbyshire. She works responsively through mediums of sculpture, drawing, photography, text, writing and curating. She makes work about making work (and being disabled) and not being able to make work (and being disabled). This process-based practice is fundamental to her as a disabled artist. She is continually motivated by concepts of public and private spaces and where the sick and/or disabled body exists within them, themes which emerge throughout much of her work.  

Joe Namy is an artist, composer, and educator often working collaboratively through the intersections of sound, video, performance, and sculpture. Their projects often focus on the politics of music and organised sound, such as the pageantry and power of opera, the noise laws and gender dynamics of bass, the colors and tones of militarisation, the migration patterns of instruments and songs, and the complexities of translation in all this—from language to language, from score to sound, from drum to dance. Joe holds a monthly DJ residency called Rhythm x Rhythm on Radio Alhara, is a Sundance/Time Studios Kendeda fellow, the artist in residence for the London Borough of Barking & Dagenham, and a PHD researcher at the Ruskin School of Art at Oxford University. 

Daniel Oduntan is an interdisciplinary media artist conceptional occupying the spaces between visual arts, sound and performance media. Predominantly from a sound engineering background; graduating from the London College of Music & Media in 2007; from 2010 he began working in the visual arts and heritage sector. Nominated soon after for best British emerging artist by the Mica Gallery in 2012, and furthering his professional media experience as a multimedia assistant at the V&A Museum within their digital media and publishing department; leaving in 2019. His polymath approach to creativity has led him to explore in recent years; the politics of sound archives, the power of imagery, methods to accessibility and spatial justice. Daniel has been commissioned, produced cross-discipline art projects and workshop talks for the likes of; the V&A Museum, UCL Bartlett, The London College of Fashion, Warp Records, The Design Museum and Publicis London. 

Sean Roy Parker is a writer, cook, gardener and visual artist based at Michael House co-living project in Shipley, Derbyshire (UK). He practises slow, low-tech crafts and landwork using leftover consumer debris and natural abundances in anticipation of the post-capitalist transition, and is a self-taught fermentation enthusiast and soil builder. He redistributes matter through flexible care structures like labour exchange, favours, artswaps, community meals and teaching. In his ongoing project Fermental Health he writes essays about and leads workshops on the lifecycle of materials, complexities of interspecies responsibility, and problem-solving through collaborative action.  

Diana Puntar is a London based artist and educator originally from New York City. She is the 2022/23 Artist in Residence at Eltham College. Her cross-disciplinary work includes sculpture, installation, drawing, and printmaking.  

In Puntar’s current project, Historical Re-Anachronism, she seeks to understand the concurrent surge of right-wing ideology in both the UK and US through researching the Revolutionary War period. Rising nationalism on both sides of the Atlantic, whether the glorification of British imperialism or an exhortation of American patriotism have roots in the edited histories and propaganda of the English colonies in North America.  

Charwei Tsai graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in industrial design and art & architectural history (2002), and the postgraduate research program La Seine at L’École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris (2010). 

Highly personal yet universal concerns spur Tsai’s multi-media practice. Geographical, social, and spiritual motifs inform a body of work, which encourages viewer participation outside the confines of complacent contemplation. Preoccupied with the human/nature relationship, Tsai meditates on the complexities among cultural beliefs, spirituality, and transience.  

Vital Capacities: Belladonna Paloma

This May we will partner with Vital Capacities and Videotage Hong Kong to host Belladonna Paloma for a month-long online residency, running alongside the Both Sides Now 2023-24 programme. The Vital Capacities residency programme offers artists an opportunity to share artwork, have a platform, develop new connections, have meetings with curators and arts professionals, and to build a new network. Residencies are flexible, and can be built around artists’ commitments, enabling artists to create, add and participate according to their schedule. 

Belladonna Paloma is an artist, poet & witch living in Shetland, UK. She paints, hand pokes tattoos, writes poetry, and makes computer games. Her work is into listening to faeries, how divination disturbs linear time, grief rituals, toilets and necromancy. Recent projects and exhibitions include: The Well of Sickness Shimmering, a computer game made in collaboration with Uma Breakdown exploring the folklore of holy wells (launching Spring 2023); Bog-lore, exhibition at Gaada, Shetland (March 2023); DRIP, group show at Two Queens, Leicester (2022); Descent to Kilgrimol Rx, solo show at Abingdon Studios, Blackpool (2022); There’s Always Things Falling Out The Sky, a book-length poem about Bigfoot phenomena, made with Roxy Topia & Paddy Gould, published by Pink Sands Studio (2021). 

Murphy Yum was born in Seoul and grew up on the outskirts of Seoul in Korea. She currently works by coming and going between France and Korea.  

As a visual artist, she works with everyday objects and machines that have a plastic exterior and appear easy to handle, such as household articles with motors and electric cradles. She pays close attention to the relationship between objects and users and seeks to transform them into something new and unexpected by repairing, dismantling, and assembling them in various installations. Through this empirical method, she creates an illusionary space where care and negligence coexist. 

Re/wilding

Each year of programming at Wysing unfolds along a theme. Drawing from Wysing’s rural site, the theme for 2022 is “re/wilding”. Together with artists and publics, we are thinking about non-extractive processes, time and restoration, land rights, access and the commons. We invite those who spend time with us to “re/wild” their practice – spending time considering what to leave behind, and what might be allowed to flourish. At a time of immense global upheaval, could this be a time to reset, recuperate, re-prioritise, or experiment in new ways?

Wysing’s vision is to cultivate the freewheeling imagination; we support ideas and practices that shape the world. At a time of increased uncertainty and precarity, particularly for artists, we are working to ensure that we use Wysing’s resources responsibly.

We have reviewed our use of open calls to consider approaches to programming that are less reliant on unpaid artist labour. Working with a network of advisors made up of Wysing alumni, we are making efforts to bring new voices into our programmes. Our 2022 Advisory Group includes Maëva Berthelot, Christelle Oyiri-K and Amanprit Sandhu.

We are also continuing to work with artists programmed as part of our Reception year, many of whom have had plans affected by Covid-19. Throughout 2021 Reception was taken as an act of welcoming, hosting and caring, tools that we will continue to focus on as we bring artists into our year of re/wilding.

Alongside our programme of residencies, Wysing will host a gathering, ‘From the Ground Up’ (more information on this can be found via this link here), a summer Open Studios and a series of pilot events that will support local and national artists via our digital and onsite resources. More information about this will be announced later in the summer.

2022 Residencies

Babeworld x utopian_realism

Babeworld and utopian_realism have decided to use their time at Wysing to be in the same space together, planning and developing ideas. Given the pressures of daily life, this time together is rare for them.

Babeworld is led by Ash Williams (she/her) and Ingrid Banerjee Marvin (she/her), with associate artists Gabriella Davies (she/her) and Caitlin Chase (she/her).

Babeworld seeks to create a more representative art world through the creation of art, fundraising and creating grants, and facilitation of events for those who are marginalised in the arts. With an emphasis on collaboration and co-creation, Babeworld’s practice focuses on themes of political and societal identity, specifically disability/access, neurodivergence, sex work and race. Their interactions with the communities they create and infiltrate consists of oversharing (otherwise known as attention-seeking) on the internet and through their events. You best believe they'd overshare at a round table, and probably also cry. Babeworld are committed to bringing their ideas and networks to institutions and organisations in the art world, whether they want to hear it or not.

utopian_realism (aka Alessandro Moroni he/him) was born and raised in Italy and is currently based in London.

Unfolding through long-term research-based projects often starting from internet-native music genres and their aesthetics and communities, his practice focuses on concepts of nostalgia cycles, controlled escapism, commodified utopian narratives and collapsing myths of progress.

Delaine Le Bas

Delaine le Bas will using the time at Wysing to explore her large-scale and outdoor practices, making use of Wysing’s extensive grounds and resources.

ISTORY*

BORN IN WORTHING 1965. DISRUPTED EDUCATION BETWEEN THE AGE OF 5 TO 16. LISTENING TO POLYSTYRENE IN 1978, DRESSING IN VINTAGE AND HANDMADE CLOTHES. 1980 GOES TO LOCAL ART SCHOOL. 1984 THE HOUSE OF LE BAS IS CREATED. 1985 DAMIAN JAMES LE BAS JOINS. 1986 TO 1988 SAINT MARTINS SCHOOL OF ART LONDON – ART, CLUBBING, FASHION. RETURNS TO WORTHING WHERE SHE STILL LIVES, CREATES ART WORKS AND KEEPS TRAVELELLING AS A LIFEIST** AND PERFORMALIST*** IN AND ACROSS THE UK AND EUROPE, SOUTH KOREA, ZIMBABWE, CANADA, RAJASTHAN. WORKS INCLUDED IN VENICE BIENNALE, PRAGUE BIENNALE, GWANGJU BIENNALE AND OTHER ART INSTITUTIONS INTERNATIONALLY. IT ALL CONTINUES...ITS WHERE YOU COME IN....

DELAINE LE BAS 2022

*ISTORY – CAROL SCHNEEMAN (1939-2019)

**LIFEIST – LINDA MONTANO (1942)

*** PERFORMALIST – HANNAH WILKE (1940-1993)

Seema Mattu

Seema Mattu will be spending time in Wysing’s Recording Studio to create a series of podCASTE’s, i.e. a programme of podcast episodes. Each episode will focus on caste within a particular area of the world. Seema Mattu is a gender-expansive Valmiki artist, whose practice is framed as a theme park known as SEEMAWORLD. Within SEEMAWORLD, vessels and portals are built and evolved, giving viewers access to the realms she constructs. Through the welding of 2D and 3D mixed-media, themes explored include: the system of caste, queer sorcery, fan labour and gender taxonomy. Projects and exhibitions include: Eastside Projects, CCA Glasgow, Fotomuseum (Zürich, CH), Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), LUX, Berwick Film and Media Festival, IKON gallery, New Art City and QUAD. She is currently participating in Film London’s FLAMIN Fellowship (2021-2022), is a recipient of New Midland Group’s Research and Development Bursary (2021-2022) and, as of December 2021, a QUAD International Digital Fellow (2021-2022).

Brooke Palmieri

Brooke will be taking the time at Wysing along with collaborators to rest and replenish via reorienting themselves under the cosmos.

Brooke Palmieri is a historian, writer, and printer, if printing can also be considered as a form of sculpture and performance. In 2018 they founded CAMP BOOKS (http://campbooks.biz), a platform for making the history of gender non-conforming people more accessible through teaching, cheap printing, and building archives and libraries. The bulk of their printed posters are drawn from intensely researched anti-assimilationist queer history, and raise funds for mutual aid projects. Their writing has been featured in publications by Pilot Press, WMN_Zine, and Louche Magazine, and recent work include "Muscle Memories" as part of In Transit, Our Memory Fragments at Chelsea Space and "Take Nothing For Granted: Theses on History," at Gaada.

Eve Stainton

During their time at Wysing, Eve Stainton will work with welding specialist Hester Thompson and a cast of 5 gender non-conforming performers (musicians and movement practitioners) to research live welding in a performance setting for a new upcoming research project.

Eve Stainton is an artist interested in the politics of uncodeable queer presence and its intersections with race and class. They create multi-disciplinary performance worlds that hold movement practices, digital collage, and welded steel, and other invisible forces like waves, imagination and drama. These forms work together to create live ecologies that are discordant, multi-layered and psychedelic. They have a continued interest in clashing and co-occurrence which is also reflected in their visual art practice. Stainton is interested in the production of conflicting states and textures to unravel essentialist thinking, with intent to create more expansive understandings of the lesbian identity, non-gender/variance, and perceptions of the ‘real’.

Notable presentations include: New commission ‘Dykegeist’ for ICA (2021), Close Encounters, Copenhagen (DE), Venice Biennale performance programme with Florence Peake (2019), Block Universe (UK), The Place (UK), Nottingham Contemporary (UK), Crac Occitanie (FR), Sadler’s Wells Lilian Baylis (UK), La Becque (SE), LCMF (UK), CCA Glasgow (UK), Tangente (CA). Features include AQNB, FACT Mag, Dazed Beauty, Twin Magazine, Art in America, This is Tomorrow. Work for other artists include Anthea Hamilton, Tai Shani, Last Yearz Interesting Negro, Sonia Boyce, Malik Nashad Sharpe, Holly Blakey, Goldfrapp, Compagnie ECO international tour, Vivienne Westwood, Claire Barrow, Art School, Molly Goddard, walking for London/Shanghai/Paris Fashion Weeks.

Fanta Sylla

Fanta Sylla will be travelling over from Paris, France to spend time at Wysing writing and developing new ideas.

Fanta Sylla is a film critic, screenwriter and director born and based in the Parisian banlieue. She has been published in Reverse Shot, The Village Voice, Criterion, Pitchfork (US), Sight and Sound (UK), Cléo Journal (CAN) and Les Inrocks (FR). She has created the Black Film Critic Syllabus, an open access compilation of files and resources on the intersection of Blackness and cinema and has taught the course Cinema in Black in New York for Pioneer Works. She is currently developing various TV projects.

Carol Sorhaindo

Carol Sorhaindo is a Visual artist with an MA in Creative Practice and a diverse portfolio career. She draws inspiration from nature, cultural heritage and landscapes with a particularly interest in plants on deteriorating mill sites in Dominica where she currently lives. Having lived in both the UK and Dominica, entangled roots and transatlantic history which combines African, Dominican and British influences are of key importance. Her research and passions include botanical histories including ethnobotanical and traditional uses of plants as food, medicine and for use as art and craft materials. She enjoys close observation of plant growth, gardening, botanical drawing and explorations of natural dyes and earth pigments for textile applications.

You can find out more about Carol’s time at Wysing via our Broadcasts site here.

Jasmine Thomas-Girvan

Jasmine Thomas-Girvan was born in the parish of St Andrew in Jamaica in 1961.

A sculptor, trained in jewellery and textile design, Jasmine received her BFA from the Parsons School of Design and has more recently explored paper making and glass blowing techniques. Her work has evolved during her career from more intimately sized, often wearable objects, to large scale installations with multimedia elements.

Jasmine’s sculptures and installations are as multifaceted as the region in which they were created. The magical realist elements evidenced within them reference ancestral memories, indigenous African cosmologies, postcolonial regional politics, race relations in both the Caribbean and Latin America as well as deeply personal, sometimes tragic aspects of her life. She has oftentimes been inspired by and sometimes referenced the works of writers such as Octavio Paz and Olive Senior.

Her awards include the Tiffany Award for Excellence at Parsons, the Prime Minister of Jamaica’s Certificate of Recognition, the Commonwealth Foundation Arts award in 1996, the Aaron Matalon Award for her contribution to the NGJ’s 2012 and 2017 Biennial exhibitions, and the 2014 Silver Musgrave Medal of the Institute of Jamaica.

Jasmine lives and works in Maraval, Trinidad.

Both Carol and Jasmine’s residencies were hosted in partnership with The World Reimagined. The World Reimagined is a ground-breaking, vibrant art education project to transform how we understand the Transatlantic Trade in Enslaved Africans and its impact on all of us so that we can make racial justice a reality, together. The World Reimagined is supported by Arts Council England, you can find out more about the project here.

Rebekah Ubuntu and Jaime Peschiera

Rebekah Ubuntu will be responding to the theme of re/wilding and using their time at Wysing to rest and recharge, collaborating with Jaime Peschiera.

Rebekah Ubuntu is a multidisciplinary artist, musician, university lecturer and artist mentor based between London and Kent, UK.

Their practice explores speculative fiction, ecologies and belonging through voice and sound art, electronic music (composition and improvisation), moving image, writing and performance. They also co-create in mixed reality, installation, podcasts and workshops.

Rebekah’s solo and collaborative works have been showcased at BBC Radio 1, BBC Radio 6, Institute of Contemporary Arts, Frieze London, Tate Modern and Tate Britain, Barbican Centre, Adam Mickiewicz Institute (Poland), Diametre Gallery (Paris), New Art Exchange (Nottingham), Four Four Gallery (Nottingham), FACT (Liverpool) and London’s Serpentine Galleries among others.

Rebekah is Artist in Residence at Drake Music (2022), a Jerwood Arts Bursary recipient (2021), Womxn of Colour Art Award finalist (2021) and Adam Reynolds Award finalist (2021).

Rebekah Ubuntu identifies as Black, queer, genderqueer and disabled. Transfeminist, disability, climate and healing justice perspectives and practices are central components of their praxis and research.

Jaime Peschiera is a Latinx artist, producer, creative director and senior lecturer in audiovisual media based in London, UK. Their current art practice explores autoethnography, critical race theory and climate justice through photography, moving image, sound art and mixed reality.

Jaime has over two decades teaching experience supporting students' creative and professional development. He has been a senior lecturer on BA and MA programmes at the University of the Arts London, the Met Film School and London Film School, and designed and taught the City Lit Film School as well as the London College of Communication’s inaugural Summer Film School.

Ubuntu and Peschiera’s collaborative works have been showcased at BBC Radio 1, BBC Radio 6, Tate Modern and Tate Britain, Barbican Centre, Adam Mickiewicz Institute (Poland), New Art Exchange (Nottingham), Four Four Gallery (Nottingham) and the ICA among others.

Gary Zhexi Zhang and Waste Paper Opera (Klara Koffen and James Oldham)

Gary Zhexi Zhang and Waste Paper Collective spent time at Wysing working on collaborative performance, Dead Cat Bounce; telling tales of time, money and the unmaking of reality in the wake of catastrophe.

Gary Zhexi Zhang’s current projects explore financial fictions and weird temporalities in the time of catastrophe. A recent body of work, Cycle 25, documented events that shape the boundaries between speculative beliefs and material realities, like natural disasters, scam nations and cosmic economies. As an artist and researcher, he has undertaken fellowships at the Berggruen Institute in L.A. and Sakiya - Art Science Agriculture in Ramallah. He is a co-founder of collaborative studio Foreign Objects, which was incubated at NEW INC and received a Mozilla Creative Media Award. As a writer, his work has appeared in ArtReview, Art Papers, Frieze, and others; he is the co-author and editor of Catastrophe Time! (Strange Attractor Press, forthcoming).

Waste Paper Opera is an experimental music theatre collective, run by composer, researcher and performer James Oldham, and artist, writer and designer Klara Kofen. Recent works include ‘Syrup Tracing’ (2020), an Ideas of Noise commission that reimagined Cyrano de Bergerac’s 1657 science-fiction tract Voyage sur la Lune, using DNA sequences of a newly discovered dictyostelium as the basis for dramaturgy and musical material. Their first collaboration with Gary Zhexi Zhang was a Medical Research Council funded project that explored the life-cycle of parasites, which culminated in a performance entitled ‘Vorephilia’ in spring 2018 at the Cambridge Junction. For ‘‘i’-the opera’ (Tête à Tête 2017, Glasgow International 2018), they collaborated with programmer Janelle Shane on a neural network libretto. WPO has hosted workshops at Central Saint Martins (OurHaus Festival – 100 Years of Bauhaus, Oct. 2019), and Limehouse Townhall (L (AI) BOUR, ‘useless l(ai)bour’, Nov.2019) and curated the interdisciplinary performance series Whole Punch at the Rosemary Branch Theatre. WPO collaborates with performers, artists, researchers and makers to create multimedia performances. Their interest centres around the potential of opera as a form of interdisciplinary making to convey and transform knowledge, and connect between fields, practices and ideas.

Dead Cat Bounce was commissioned by Arts Catalyst, with support from Medialab-Matadero. Its development was supported by Wysing Arts Centre and London Performance Studio .

2021 Residencies

Residencies taking place this year from our 2021 programme are Ruth Angel Edwards, Joanna Holland / [SYNTAX ERROR], Radio Web MACBA: Antonio Gagliano, Anna Ramos, Anna Irina Russell, and Albert Tarrats, Tammy Reynolds, and West Java West Yorkshire Cooperative Movement (WJWY): George Clark, Ismal Muntaha and Bunga Saigian.

To find out more about these artists and our 2021 Residencies programme, follow this link.

Our 2022 Residencies are supported by Arts Council England and Fenton Arts Trust.

25 October-19 November 2021

We are pleased to announce the second Net//Work Residency, in partnership with British Council and DAS Belfast. Wysing Arts Centre will host artists Laura Andreato, Halik Azeez, Wajeeha Batool, and Wendy Teo during this four week online residency, with Anna Bunting-Branch as artist mentor.

Net//Work offers time for reflection, research, practice, skills exchange, and professional networking opportunities focused on digital artistic practices and technologies. This autumn's residency artists are internationally based across Brazil, Malaysia, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. The residencies will consist of online mentoring, group conversations, problem solving surgeries, guest talks and workshops with external curators and artists and 1-2-1 tuition. Following the residency, artists will have the opportunity to participate in an online exhibition hosted by each residency partner.

British Council in partnership with Wysing Arts Centre and Digital Arts Studios

Laura Andreato is a visual artist and art educator, set and costume designer. Laura graduated in Visual Arts at São Paulo University, holds a master's degree in Visual Poetics and is currently pursuing her doctorate.

Laura has exhibited in sole and collective shows in museums and galleries both within Brazil and globally. Prominent exhibitions include Pensamiento Salvaje, part of Bienal Sur (Buenos Aires, 2017); Le Royale (La Maudite, Paris, 2014), Deslize (Museu de Arte do Rio de Janeiro, 2014) and Paradiso, Museu de Arte de São Paulo -MASP (São Paulo, 2012).

Laura has also participated in the Pivô Pesquisa Program 2019, 13th artistic residency at Red Bull Station 2017 and in 2018 she nominated for the Pipa Award. In 2014 she was in residence at Cité des Arts, selected by the Institut Français.

Halik Azeez is a new media artist based in Colombo Sri Lanka with a background in journalism and critical discourse analysis. His work reflects on technologies of power as mediated through contemporary culture, lived experiences and media.

Transformations within Sri Lanka’s post-war urban landscape is a central archive from which Azeez draws, working across a range of mediums such as photography, video, digital interventions, writing, installation and publication.

In 2019 he co-founded The Packet, an independent community of artists which works with publication, digital interventions and site specific installations. He has held solo exhibitions at the Saskia Fernando Gallery, Colombo (2014 & 2021) and exhibited widely both locally and internationally including at the Ishara Foundation, Dubai (2019 & 2021), the Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa (2016, 2019 & 2020), The Art Foundation, Athens (2017), Edinburgh Festival Fringe (2017), the Karachi Biennale (2019) and Colomboscope (2015, 2016, 2017 & 2019). 

Wajeeha Batool is an artist based in Lahore, Pakistan. Wajeeha earned her Bachelors and Masters degrees in Visual Arts at the Beacon House National University (BNU) where she was subsequently a Montessori teacher.

Wajeeha investigates the relationship between fantasy and reality, drawing on her experience to layer and create systematic chaos in her work. Her use of both organic forms and pixelated shapes serve as reference to living organisms as well as the world of technology. These patterns work together in harmony, often superimposed upon the other, to create a reverie of unpredictable movement and transparent effects.

Wajeeha’s artwork has been shown in exhibitions in Alhamrah Art Gallery, Lahore, Karachi Art Summit, Sanat Initiative Art Gallery Karachi: Reading Between the Lines, Taseer Gallery, Lahore: Domestic Bliss and Antidote Gallery Dubai. She also won a second place award for Arts Contest from Shaukat Khanum Hospital, Title: Smoking Kills. 

Wendy Teo is a Malaysian based artist, UK ARB/RIBA Chartered Architect, Curator, Researcher and Tutor. Wendy believes an innovative, cutting-edge approach to design and making has capacity to revitalise craftsmanship of the region; stating social-culture dialogue as the driving force behind her design pursuit.

In her award winning design practice Wendy Teo Atelier, she designed a range of nature and culture inspired interactive sculptures, furniture, architectural installation and publication. With Borneo Laboratory, Wendy currently focuses on developing a series of projects that are inspired by the crafts language and materials found from abundant landscape and cultural scape of Borneo.

Wendy Teo’s projects were endorsed by a number of international awards such as Holcim Sustainable Next Generation Award (First Prize), Archiprix, and Threadneedle Prize. Her recent furniture design was selected as a finalist in ‘Asia Design Award’ 2018. Wendy has shown in prominent exhibitions such as 2013/14 Archilab ‘Naturalising Architecture’ exhibition curated by Pompidou Center director Frédéric Migayrou and FRAC Orlean Director Marie-Ange Brayer.

Anna Bunting-Branch (born 1987, Cambridge, UK) is an artist and researcher based in London. Recent solo presentations include Warm Worlds and Otherwise, QUAD, Derby (2020) and Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge (2018), and The Labours of Barren House, Jerwood Space, London (2017).

Selected group presentations and events include Soft Bodies, Castlefield Gallery, Manchester (2020); Crepuscolo (DUSK) (2020), Bastione Sangallo, Loreto; you feel me_, FACT, Liverpool (2019); All His Ghosts Must Do My Bidding, Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge (2019); La Nit del Cos, Bombon Projects, Barcelona (2019); Waking the Witch: Old Ways, New Rites, UK venues (2018-2019); Landscapes of the Future, Helsinki Contemporary (2018); POEKHALI!, Bergen Kunsthall (2018); Hauntopia/What If?, The Research Pavilion, Venice (2017); I AM SF,CCA Derry~Londonderry (2017); Witchy Methodologies, ICA, London (2017).

Her published work includes Fandom as Methodology, Goldsmiths Press (2019); ‘More generous and more suspicious’—Feminist SF as a worldbuilding practice, MAP Magazine (2018); figure, feels,fantom, ArtLicks, Issue 22 (2018). Anna is currently undertaking a practice-related PhD at Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, supported by the AHRC London Arts & Humanities Partnership. In 2019 she was awarded an Arts Council England Project Grant. Moving between different practices–including painting, writing and animation–her work explores science fiction as a methodology to re-vision feminist practice and its histories. www.annabuntingbranch.com

We have developed this alternative learning programme for artists aged 18 to 25 years to test new approaches and ideas through workshops and talks, whilst also having time to develop their own work. This year AMPlify will take place as a hybrid programme, with an initial residency at Wysing in October followed by online sessions.  

Click here to view the participating artist bioagraphies.

Click here for more information about the online showcase on 28 April.

Artist Information:

• This residency is for artists aged between 18–25 years.
• We are keen to support artists who have not previously had access to similar opportunities.
• Artists who want to test and share their ideas with others.
• Artists looking for inspiration to create new work.
• We will be looking to develop a group of artists working across a range of creative practice with an emphasis on digital media and games.
• Artists will be expected to attend all the group sessions.

What you will get out of it:

• Have access to some of the most exciting contemporary artists working today who have experience in teaching.
• Participate in mentoring opportunities.
• Develop your ideas and create new work to showcase on WysingBroadcasts.Art
• Develop knowledge of contemporary art practice with a focus on digital media and games.
• Meet and experiment with peers in a supportive environment.
• Have the opportunity to work towards a Gold Arts Award.

Key dates: 

14 October, 3–5pm, introductory session, online 

22–24 October, residency at Wysing including workshops 1 and 2 

25 November, 3–5.30pm, workshop 3, online 

16 December, 3 –5.30pm, workshop 4, online 

20 December, mentors chosen and allocated 

6 January, mentoring session information and next steps 

January – March, three 1-2-1 mentoring sessions to take place between artists, arranged individually 

31 March, deadline to send through completed final work 

14 April, deadline to send through completed showcase of final work 

28 April, 7–8pm, online showcase of final work on WysingBroadcasts.Art 

In addition to these sessions we will encourage participating artists to collaborate through informal online sharing sessions over Discord and Zoom. 

Contributing Artists

Uma Breakdown, click here to view their artist biography.

Dylan Fox, click here to view their artist biography.

Carl Gent, click here to view their artist biography.

Rebekah Ubuntu, click here to view their artist biography.

Click here to view participating staff biographies.

Click here to view participating artist biographies.

August 2021

In partnership with Vital Capacities and ICA Cape Town, Wysing Arts Centre hosted the fifth Vital Capacities online residency with ...kruse, Siphenati Mayekiso, Nadine Mckenzie and Rebekah Ubuntu.

Click here for information about the residency on the Vital Capacities website.

Image credit: Artists and their work from far left image clockwise: Siphenati Mayekiso; Nadine Mckenzie; …kruse; Artist Rebekah Ubuntu (pictured), commissioned performance at Tate Britain, image courtesy of Tate London. Find Rebekah online @rebekahubuntu

Working with the partner organisations, the artists explored and exchanged new ideas using their studio spaces, and create new works throughout the residency. 

The artists for August 2021’s residency were:

...kruse

…kruse (UK) is a neurodivergent, experimental artist and writer, whose practice includes drawing, text, storytelling and autoethnographical research. …kruse uses walking, short hikes and longer pilgrimages, to gather data and stories and explore her relationship with the Earth. She is interested in the connections between landscape, mythmaking, magic and science.

Rebekah Ubuntu

Rebekah Ubuntu (UK) is a multidisciplinary artist, musician and university lecturer. Their practice explores speculative fiction through electronic music, sound art, voice, performance, installation, text, songwriting and the moving image. Ubuntu has been commissioned and exhibited work by Tate Britain, Tate Modern, Frieze London, Barbican Centre, Adam Mickiewicz Institute (Poland), Diametre Gallery (Paris), New Art Exchange (Nottingham), FACT (Liverpool) and London’s Serpentine Galleries.

Siphenati Mayekiso

Siphenati Mayekiso (SA) was born in Cape Town and grew up between the city and the rural areas of Eastern Cape. His introduction to Theatre and Performance started at the age of 13, when he was part of forming a drama youth group at IThemba Labantu Centre. His hunger for storytelling took him to UNIMASA to learn puppetry skills, and this is where his group won the Active Puppetry Competition.  Two years later he joined the Magnet Theatre training program under the direction of Jennie Reznek and Mark Fleishman. After graduating, he went on to Okiep and joined the Garage Dance Company for intense workshops under the tutelage of Alfred Hinkel. His ever-growing hunger for performance took him to an integrated dance company called Unmute Dance Company. There he started as a trainee and later outreach teacher, a facilitator, a company dance member, and a choreographer. So far, he has presented his solo work called Blood Bath under the direction of the late Standard Bank Young Artist Themba Mbuli in South Africa and Germany.

Nadine Mckenzie

Nadine Mckenzie (SA) is a qualified integrated dance teacher, receiving training from Alito Alessi at the ImpulsTanz International festival in Vienna in 2010. In 2006 she joined  Remix Dance Company. Since then she had produced exceptional work as a  performer/ teacher in a wheelchair and has established herself as a well-recognized figure within the performing arts community both nationally and internationally.

To follow what the artists are up to, join the mailing list and follow them by visiting the Vital Capacities website here.

August’s residency programme was delivered in partnership with Institute for Creative Arts and Wysing Art Centre, with support from Arts Council England.

Vital Capacities was an accessible, purpose-built digital residency space that supports artists’ practice while engaging audiences with their work.

Vital Capacities was created by videoclub in consultation with artists, digital inclusion specialist Sarah Pickthall and website designer Oli Pyle. Visit the videoclub website by clicking here.

18 January - 14 February 2021

Net//Work is a four-week residency developed in partnership with British Council offering artists a period of reflection, research, practice, skills exchange and professional networking opportunities focused on digital artistic practices and technologies.

Wysing worked with artists Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Uma Breakdown, Nikissi Serumaga and Leyya Tawil with support from David Blandy.

Digital Arts Studios working with Golden Thread Gallery and Momentum Berlin hosted Rita Adib, Mohamed Abdel Gawad, Tim Shaw and Maya Chowdhry. Artists took part in a programme of activities including peer-to-peer exchange, mentoring, group critiques and presentations. The 2021residency took place online due to Covid-19.

The online residency aimed to find points of connection between four very exciting but very different practices. The online sessions in the residency provided critical support in the form of mentoring, group conversations, problem solving surgeries, guest talks and reading groups. These sessions were used to test ideas, tease out solutions and suggest new possible directions for these artists' projects. Following the residency, artists had the opportunity to participate in an online exhibition.

Drawing on his knowledge of digital technology within creative practices, Blandy, whose practice slips between performance and video worked with Syrian-born Leyya Tawil and Ugandan-based Nikissi Serumaga. Currently living in New York, Tawil is a performance and installation artist working with voice, movement and interactive audio electronics, whilst Serumaga is interested in stretching the limits of the screen, looking at the conjunction between physical objects, 3D space and ephemeral moments.  

Joining was UK-based artists Danielle Braithwaite-Shirley and Uma Breakdown. Working with video game, animation, sound and performance, Brathwaite-Shirley uses digital technologies to archive Black and Trans experiences, whilst Breakdown uses parallels drawn from experimental feminist writing practices, the study of horror cinema and game design to reconfigure art as an encounter with unstable and desirable processes. 

British Council in partnership with Wysing Arts Centre and Digital Arts Studios

Reception

Wysing’s 2021 programme will take the theme of reception. This is intended as both a second part to last year’s broadcasting theme and a response to the challenging events of 2020. An understanding of reception as an act of welcoming, hosting and caring will shape our organisational priorities for the next year.

At a time of increased uncertainty and precarity, particularly for artists, we feel an obligation to use Wysing’s resources responsibly. We will increase the portion of our annual budget spent on artist fees and new commissions across onsite residencies, remote residencies, digital and learning programmes. We will be undertaking a review of artists’ pay across all our programmes. 

We are reviewing our use of open calls to consider approaches to programming that are less reliant on unpaid artist labour. Working with a network of advisors made up of Wysing alumni, we are making efforts to bring new voices into our programmes. Throughout the year, our team will host a large scale programme of free 1-2-1 sessions, aimed at supporting many of the artists who have not been able to access opportunities at Wysing and keeping in touch with the artists we already know. 

We are continuing to work with artists programmed as part of our broadcasting year, many of whom have had plans affected by Covid-19. Focusing on reception, the component of broadcasting that receives information, means an openness and sensitivity to the new and unknown, while also considering how Wysing and our programmes can be not only a platform or a tool for speaking, but also a tool for listening.

2021 Residencies

Leah Clements
Leah Clements will be in residence at Wysing Arts Centre in 2021 taking time and space to reflect on recent work, and developing projects on access, diving, cosmonauts, come-downs, and other moments of bliss followed by a return to Earth. 

Leah Clements is an artist based in London whose practice spans film, performance, writing, installation, and other media. Her work is concerned with the relationship between the psychological, emotional, and physical, often through personal accounts of unusual or hard-to-articulate experiences. Her work also focuses on sickness/cripness/disability in art, in critical and practical ways. 

Madam Data 
Madam Data will spend their residency researching and developing new work. 

Madam Data is a musician (composer) and sound scientist who explores machine and spirit interfaces. Their fantasies are about truly knowing what sacredness is, echolocating spaces infused with spirits, and begetting ghosts in the technology they create. In finding these things, they seek a liberatory practice that uses sound to return bodies to resonance. Madam Data works with synthesizers, handmade computer programs and circuits, field recordings and clarinets; they consider these objects to be interfaces with the Divine presence; they work with the sonics of stillness, space and brutal intensity.

Sonya Dyer
Sonya Dyer will continue to work on her long term project Hailing Frequencies Open, focusing on scripting speculative narratives and collaborating with animator Adam Sinclair on visualising Space travel. 

Sonya Dyer is an artist and writer from London, and is a Somerset House Studios Resident and most recently UK Associate Artist at the Delfina Foundation. She is a finalist for the Arts Foundation Futures Award 2021, and an alum of Whitney Museum of American Art: Independent Study Program. 

Dyer’s practice explores how subjectivities and alliances are formed across cultures and temporalities, creating possible futures. 

Hailing Frequencies Open (HFO), her current body of work, intersects the Greek myth of Andromeda, the dubious legacy of HeLa cells and actor Nichelle Nicols’ pioneering work in diversifying the NASA astronaut pool in the 1970s as the starting point for an exploration of Black female subjectivities within narratives of the future. HFO combines social justice with speculation, fantasy with the political.

Deborah Findlater
Deborah Findlater will be using this time to develop her verbal and sonic practice, experimenting with building soundscapes. Currently their research for the residency surrounds oral storytelling, African astronomy, the sky’s role in providing us with guidance and this thematic prominence within Black music. 

Deborah Findlater is a visual, verbal and sonic artist from South London. Across film, video, installation, poetry and sound pieces, her work centres Blackness from a queer, decolonial and feminist perspective. They are drawn to such techniques as montage, layering, collage and using found, often lo-fi footage, both deconstructing narrative and piecing it together in a polyphonic way. 

Notable screen-based works include Blue Mountain (2014), Jezzy (2017) and Small Axes (2018), which have been shown at institutions such as ICA, London, Somerset House Studios and South London Gallery. Sonic performances have taken place at Archway Sound Symposium, July 2019 and Auto Italia, September 2019. November 2019 saw her debut solo exhibition Sacred Space at Cubitt Gallery. She is a member of London based QTIBPOC led sound system Black Obsidian Sound System (B.O.S.S.) and has an MA in Experimental Film from Kingston School of Art. 

Joanna Holland / [SYNTAX ERROR] 
Creative producer/curator Joanna Holland & [SYNTAX ERROR], a pseudonym used for her artist-self, will spend time researching narratives of [in]visible disability; looking to identify and better understand artistic practice which explores a more inclusive landscape. Resulting expansive dialogue, and disruption of unhelpful binary narratives, will ameliorate thinking on how the cultural sector/society can better represent and engage difference.

Building on Joanna’s background in feminist art histories, cultural inclusion, and biodiversity conservation, her practice investigates knowledge production and exchange. Often drawing on French Feminist Theorists Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous, she uses acts of multiplicity to create inclusive, semiotic landscapes; part real, part imagined, but informed by lived experience - including soundscapes and an award-winning V-R landscape. And then everything I knew was true was true [CYANOPSIA], an immersive installation exploring [in]visible disability, has been shortlisted for a 2021 ‘UNLIMITED Emerging Artist Commission’.

She is interested in how we live with each other, and on our planet, sustainably. Driven by the belief that interdisciplinary and participatory approaches give meaning to our world and enable richer experiences for everyone; she works collaboratively, co-producing with different communities, alongside artists, scientists, and academics. She has worked with/for CCI, CC&I, NESTA, Tate and others.

Honey Colony
The Honey Colony is a decentralised collaboration from Lafawndah and friends, originating from her mixtape series of the same name. Materialising as a live performance at the Southbank Centre in 2018, the Honey Colony is equal parts  celebration and provocation, upending the relationship between performer, producer and audience.

After a year of distance, the Honey Colony come together for a residency at Wysing Arts Centre to create new music for their future performances, continuing their explorations into concert experiences with a spirit of positive anarchy and public intimacy. This is an important moment to regroup, to collaborate, to heal together and to create; an opportunity to reconnect in fluid friendships and affinities, and amongst peers whose work is some of the most forward thinking body of music today. Joining the residency will be Lafawndah, Coby Sey, ElHeist, Valentina Magaletti, Crystallmess + guests.

Juliet Jacques
Juliet Jacques will work on a screenplay about British socialist politician Victor Grayson, known for a sensational by-election victory in Colne Valley in 1907 and for disappearing without explanation in 1920. Juliet Jacques is a writer and filmmaker based in London. She has published two books, most recently Trans: A Memoir (Verso, 2015) - her short story collection Variations will be out on Influx Press in June 2021. Her essays, criticism and journalism have appeared in many publications, from The London Review of Books to Tribune, and her short films have screened in galleries and festivalsworldwide. She hosts Suite (212) on Resonance 104.4fm - a radio programme that looks at the arts in their social, cultural, political and historical contexts. She teaches at the Royal College of Art, City Lit and elsewhere.

Shenece Oretha 
Over the course of her residency Oretha will utilise the time, space and recording facilities at Wysing to generate elements of her works. Taking cues from Black Avant Garde practices and literature she will experiment with live formats to compose components of her sound sculptures, installations and potential performances. Whilst also working alongside collaborators and hosting guests to sound out and examine the rhythm and possibilities of these words and works not just for voice and instrument, but also for life. 

Shenece Oretha is a London based multidisciplinary artist sounding out and visualising the voice and sound's mobilising potential. Through installation, performance, print, sculpture, sound, workshops and text she amplifies and celebrates listening and sound as an embodied and collective practice. Her work is attentive to not just the music, but the musicality of her experiences of Black oral traditions, ceremony, spiritual practice and literature together with the intimate emotional, physical, relational and communal resonance they generate.

Tammy Reynolds 
I am going to use the residency to: Rest/Play/Be with people who aren’t my housemates/Create a safe crip queer space for myself/Laugh until I fucking piss myself/Dance about/Sing loudly/Try not to be depressed/Lay in grass/Swim somewhere/Breathe non-city air/Wake up in the morning/Maybe make some art/Maybe not 

This is a post-COVID bio because everything has changed. For some reason artists speak about themselves in third person. Tammy Reynolds doesn’t like doing that, neither does her occasional alter-ego Midgitte Bardot. So they’re not going to. I explore performance art, live art and drag with the body of a dwarf and a mind of a very bored dwarf. I USED to sing, dance, scream, laugh, cry out my trauma on a stage. Now I do it in my bedroom, at my webcam. I explore how disabled bodies exist in the arts and interrogate the notion of humour and ridicule of the other. I witness the previous portrayal of bodies or minds like mine and I spit it back out with glitter and goo or the virtual equivalent.  These people have given me money because I asked them and they deemed me worthy: Live Art Development Agency, DaDaFest, Heart of Glass, Scottee and Friends Ltd, FACT, Artsadmin and maybe TWO or THREE more! 

2020 Residencies
2020 was an extraordinary year for everyone and like many other organisations we had to adapt our planned programme in response to the pandemic. Artists had the option of postponing residencies and opportunities, adapting projects, moving projects online and advance payment of fees and budgets. As a result, a number of 2020 residencies are ongoing:

Ruth Angel Edwards and collaborators Adam Gallagher, Chloée Maugile, Conrad Pack and Emily Pope

Adham Faramawy

Radio Wed MACBA: Albert Tarrats, Anna Irina and Antonio Gagliano

Sickness Affinity Group: Clay AD, Frances Breden, Fee Grabow, Hang Linton, Laura Lulika, Anisha Muller, Romily Alice Walden and Lauryn Youden

Hannah Wallis

West Java West Yorkshire Cooperative Movement (WJWY): George Clark, Ismal Muntaha and Bunga Saigian

You can explore the work of our 2020 artists in-residence here, read more about our plans and commitments here and find out more about our free reception 1-2-1 sessions here.

Our 2021 Advisory Group includes Camae Ayewa, Jade Montserrat, Louise Shelley and Dominique White.

AMPlify is an alternative learning programme for artists aged 18 to 25 years to test new approaches and ideas through workshops and talks, whilst also having time to develop their own work. AMPlify 2020-21 took place entirely online and explored explore how digital tools and games can be used to create and explore future visions of the world.

The 10 artists selected for AMPlify were: Lauren Clifford-Keane, Kelly Emelle, Jules Fennell, Poppy Jones-Little, Lucie MacGregor, Rosemary Moss, Alexis Parinas, Johanna Saunderson, Oliver Warren and Frances Whorrall-Campbell.

To read a PDF of their full biographies, click here.

The participating artists were supported by contributing and mentoring artists Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley,
Anna Bunting-Branch and Robin Buckley (rkss) and mentoring artists Laura Fox and
Harold Offeh.

To read a PDF of the contributing artists full biographies, click here.

During the AMPlify Residency, participating artists:

- had access to some of the most exciting contemporary artists working today who have experience in teaching.

- participated in mentoring opportunities.

- developed ideas and created new work to showcase through the WysingBroadcasts.Art online platform.

- developed knowledge of contemporary art practice with a focus on digital media and games.

- met and experimented with peers in a supportive environment.

- had the opportunity to work towards a Gold Arts Award.

During 2020, we supported a range of artist residencies putting broadcasting at the centre of our artistic programme. Artists connected with remote and physically distant audiences in a way that privileged listening as much as the transmission of ideas, building and sustaining radical online communities.

In 2020, online and digital communities had greater importance as we sought to support and connect with one another throughout the global health crisis. Through residencies, live broadcasts, podcasts and events we used digital and other technologies to connect with audiences, foregrounding listening alongside transmission, and building new online communities.

Artists, musicians, curators and researchers from the UK, Europe, USA, Indonesia, Syria and Uganda worked with us. In response to the ongoing COVID-19 situation, we were flexible in enabling artists to change the dates of their residencies or change how they wished to approach them. 

Wysing Broadcasts became an experimental broadcasting space with works produced during the residencies being transmitted. Building on the work of our recent programmes, we focused on connecting a network of ‘many voices’ made up of those often left out of the conversation, whether due to access requirements, location outside of metropolitan centres, or discrimination due to race, gender and/or sexuality.

2020 was an extraordinary year for everyone and like many other organisations we had to adapt our planned programme in response to the pandemic. Artists had the option of postponing residencies and opportunities, adapting projects, moving projects online and advance payment of fees and budgets. As a result, a number of 2020 residencies are ongoing.

ONGOING

Travis Alabanza  

Travis Alabanza will work with Wysing on a remote residency in January 2021.

Alabanza will collaborate with director Sam Curtis Lindsay and producer Nina Lyndon to continue research for their 2022 theatre show exploring single mothers, taking risks, and relationships between mother and child.

Ruth Angel Edwards  

Through archival research and collaborative investigations, Ruth Angel Edwards will explore the role of broadcast media in community organising and bringing people together, both historically and looking to its future positive potential. Edwards will be joined by various collaborators, including Adam Gallagher, Chloée Maugile, Conrad Pack and Emily Pope to create new works exploring the dissemination of radical and counter cultural material through music subcultures.

Adham Faramawy  

Existing at the intersection of the body and technology, Adham Faramawy’s work spans media including moving image, sculptural installation and print, to discuss issues of materiality, touch, (toxic) embodiment and identity construction. Faramawy will be in residence creating new work which will be presented as part of his Art Night commission in 2021. 

Net//Work: David Blandy with Uma Breakdown, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Nikissi Serumaga and Leyya Tawil

Working in partnership with The British Council and Digital Arts Studios, Belfast, Net//Work is a programme of residencies that investigate digital technologies.

Drawing on his knowledge of digital technology within creative practices, Blandy, whose practice slips between performance and video will be working with Syrian born Leyya Tawil and Ugandan based Nikissi Serumaga. Currently living in New York, Tawil is a performance and installation artist working with voice, movement and interactive audio electronics, whilst Serumaga is interested in stretching the limits of the screen, looking at the conjunction between physical objects, 3D space and ephemeral moments.  

Joining will be UK-based artists Danielle Braithwaite-Shirley and Uma Breakdown. Working with video game, animation, sound and performance, Brathwaite-Shirley uses digital technologies to archive Black and Trans experiences, whilst Breakdown uses parallels drawn from experimental feminist writing practices, the study of horror cinema and game design to reconfigure art as an encounter with unstable and desirable processes. 

Radio Web MACBA: Albert Tarrats, Anna Irina and Antonio Gagliano 

Radio Web MACBA is an online radio project. It is a collaboration between Albert Tarrats, Anna Irina and Antonio Gagliano at MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona and has been active for 13 years. 

As members of that working group and also artists with their own individual practices, Tarrats, Irina and Gagliano will spend their time at Wysing exploring hardware related to broadcasting (sniffers and antenna).

They will build sound libraries, record with residency artists and test different methods for sharing embodied knowledge and research.

Sickness Affinity Group: Clay AD, Frances Breden, Fee Grabow, Hang Linton, Laura Lulika, Anisha Muller, Romily Alice Walden, Lauryn Youden 

Sickness Affinity Group is a group of art workers and activists who work on the topic of sickness/disability and/or are affected by sickness/disability. They function as a support group that challenges the competitive and ableist mode of working in the arts by sharing experiences and information and by prioritizing the well-being and access needs of its group members. The group investigates accessibility as both a topic and curatorial method and aim to celebrate and create room for non-normative bodies, politics, and desires, as well as offering a supportive environment for fragility and wellbeing.

Hannah Wallis  

Hannah Wallis is an artist-curator, researcher and co-founder of Dyad Creative. She will be in-residence throughout the year conducting research as part of an innovative programme to support the career development of D/deaf and Disabled Curators, in partnership with DASH, Midlands Art Centre (MAC) and Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (MIMA).

West Java West Yorkshire Cooperative Movement (WJWY): George Clark, Ismal Muntaha and Bunga Siagian 

WJWY was initiated in 2018 by George Clark, Ismal Muntaha, Bunga Saigian and Will Rose, as a platform for exchange and collaboration between communities in West Java, Indonesia, focused around the Jatiwangi art Factory and around Pavilion in West Yorkshire. For this project, George Clark, Ismal Muntaha and Bunga Saigian will co-ordinate and facilitate a series of transmissions from across each region, drawing together artists and communities connected with the project. 

COMPLETED

Kelechi Anucha & Carl Gent

Building on research into English folk song at the MERL, Vaughan Williams Library and the Seeger/Lloyd archives held at Goldsmiths Library, Anucha and Gent spent their time in-residence developing, recording and broadcasting new recordings. Reworking the form of traditional folk songs, Anucha and Gent looked at themes including rurality, sonic commons, narrative tropes, pagan/Christian integration, low/high cultural forms, the radical duality between oral and broadcast communication, and the ways in which folk songs have contributed to varying political projects and have undermined the English imaginary. 

Maëva Berthelot & Coby Sey

As part of Wysing Polyphonic: The Ungoverned, choreographer and dancer Maëva Berthelot and musician Coby Sey worked on a newly commissioned performance responding to the festival's themes of deconstructing normativity through collaboration and exchange.

Robin Buckley & Laura Fox  

As an artist, electronic music composer and theorist, rkss (Robin Buckley) takes a critical approach to music with their experimental productions, using sound as a series of gestures to explore complex socio-political issues by working with and pushing against social contexts. rkss' live sets fuse unpredictable, divergent rhythms with radical synthesis techniques to reimagine and explore speculative futures, creating space for different ways of being. Their releases Brostep in the Style of Florian Hecker and DJ Tools (UIQ), named one of Pitchfork’s experimental albums of 2018, resist categorisation while questioning established hierarchies within electronic music.

Inspired by the critical essays of Terre Thaemlitz, rkss expanded on their practice at Somerset House Studios to compose new work along with a series of immersive virtual installations with Laura Fox. 

Christelle Oyiri-K AKA Crystallmess 

Tackling the subjects of club culture, colonial alienation and alternative temporalities, Christelle Oyiri-K is a sound artist, writer and DJ from France. She undertook a remote residency, conducting research and experimenting with sound synthesis and field recordings from a research trip to Guadeloupe and Martinique, exploring the intersection of anti-environmentalism, state secrecy and institutional racism. 

Rebecca Jagoe, Jessa Mockridge, Maija Timonen, Rosa-Johan Uddoh and Anna Zett 

Rebecca Jagoe, Jessa Mockridge, Maija Timonen, Rosa-Johan Uddoh and Anna Zett assembed new work on ‘the gut’: interdependency, analytic fiction, radical self-love, verbal and nonverbal power and resistance and a politics of listening.

Linda Stupart

Linda Stupart conducted a residency developing a new body of work. Stupart worked with collaborators, and fellow residency artists, Carl Gent and Kelechi Anucha. 

Sophie J Williamson

Sophie completed a curatorial residency in the summer. Sophie’s research focuses on latent communications at play amongst the structures and taxonomies that we use to navigate our place within existence: the silences between words, between objects, between individuals, between era, between millennia of rock strata, between the matter of the entire universe, and amongst the infinite quantum possibilities within it. 

We look forward to announcing new residencies in spring 2021.

Amplify Residency

9 - 12 August 2019

Wysing Arts Centre hosts many artists in-residence across the year in our onsite farmhouse and range of artist studios. This new short residency, entitled Amplify, invites artists aged 18 to 25 years, to test new approaches and ideas through workshops and talks, whilst also having time to develop their own work. The residency takes Wysing’s forthcoming exhibition, All His Ghosts Must Do My Bidding’ as a starting point for discussion and making. Artists have the opportuntiy to work towards a Gold Arts Award, attend the annual Wysing Polyphonic music festival, stay on site at Wysing and make use of the facilities to develop knowledge of contemporary art practice with a focus on digital media and sound by working with artists Jack Cornell, Joey Holder, Jill McKnight and Harold Offeh.

Selected artists for AMPlify 2019 are: Joe Beedles, George Bularca, Dan Guthrie, Mourad Kourbaj, Anya Levicki, Blue Maignien, Liberty Quinn and Muneerah Yate. 

Friday 9 August

Following site inductions and a social lunch, the group will be taking part in an icebreaker and movement workshop with artist Harold Offeh around Wysing, exploring the most urgent concerns within their artistic practice. The group will have have the opportunity of 1:1 mentoring sessions with Harold Offeh and explore All His Ghosts Must Do My Bidding before cooking a communal dinner at Wysing.

Saturday 10 August

The group will start the day with exploring the possibilities of the Polyphonic Recording Studio at Wysing, before enjoying a communal lunch. The afternoon will start off with an introductory talk on digital practice by Joey Holder, before the artists are invitited to explore digital image and video manipulation with projections to create new narratives from a fragmented realtiy. Artists will have the opportunity for 1:1 mentoring with Joey Holder before cooking a communal dinner at Wysing.

Sunday 11 August

After breakfast on Sunday the group will have a chance to reflect and develop their own work, before investigating Jill McKnight's working process through a talk and collaborative sound workshop to explore the different character roles that artists play. The group will enjoy a shared lunch before continuing with collaborative activities or their own work, and 1:1 mentoring sessions with Jill McKnight. The group will walk into Bourn to enjoy dinner together.

Monday 12 August

Monday morning will offer artists the opprunity to each use 20 minutes of group time as they would like; to discuss ideas, ask questions, or interrogate new projects with AMPlify artists and Wysing curators John Bloomfield and Amanprit Sandhu. After the last communal lunch the group will have the opportunity to reflect on their experience of the weekend and set new aspriations in a digital GIF making workshop with Jack Cornell.

Artist in-Residence Exchange
Spring 2019

Wysing is an associate partner with Future Assembly for an international residency exchange. In its second iteration, Future Assembly takes the form of a two-way exchange between artists Simnikiwe Buhlungu (SA) and Michaela Yearwood-Dan (UK).

Michaela Yearwood-Dan will spend one month in Johannesburg in February 2019, taking part in a curated residency with Visual Arts Network South Africa (VANSA). She will meet with locally based artists and cultural practitioners, have studio space and the opportunity to engage with the art scenes of the city and the country.

In return, Simnikiwe Buhlungu will come to the UK for four weeks in May, spending time in London and at Wysing. During her curated residency Simnikiwe will be introduced to the UK’s cultural networks and experience the energy of the capital city and the focused residency space at Wysing – connecting with a variety of audiences here.

Both artists will be commissioned to make new work that will be exhibited as part of the Lagos Biennial 26 October – 30 November 2019.

Founded by Curator, Hansi Momodu-Gordon, Future Assembly is a platform for bespoke international artist residencies, unique opportunities to exhibit work and mentoring to artists who are at pivotal moments in their careers.

Biographies

Simnikiwe Buhlungu (b. Johannesburg, 1995) is a recent graduate from the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, and a member of the collective Title in Transgression. Buhlungu’s works materialise through text, print, installation or digital media and delve into socio-political and historical narratives. Buhlungu's practice undertakes an analysis of language and the relationships between messages conveyed visually, linguistically and sonically. Her works pose questions that are intentionally unanswered or even unanswerable, but that act as a catalyst for social discourse.

Michaela Yearwood-Dan (b. 1994) is a London based artist. Working predominantly with paint and collage, Yearwood-Dan mixes traditional Fine Art with elements of pop culture; often interchanging between figurative and abstract work. Vibrant botanical homages to the Caribbean are juxtaposed against urban aesthetics. 

Yearwood-Dan’s work explores themes of class, culture, race, gender and nature through a nostalgic lens. Taking inspiration from personal and archival photographs of black livelihood, and reflecting on the duality in her mixed Caribbean and British cultural upbringing.

A graduate of Fine Art from the University of Brighton, Michaela Yearwood-Dan was selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2017 and has recently exhibited with Unit London, Sarabande Foundation, and Van Goetz Art.

Future Assembly Session Two: Exchange features as part of Africa/UK: Transforming Art Ecologies, a project by New Art Exchange (NAE). Supported by NAE, Arts Council England, and the associate partners VANSA and Wysing Arts Centre.

Artist in-Residence
​Spring 2019

As part of the The Freelands Lomax Ceramics Fellowship, Wysing is hosting Athanasios Argianas for a period of three weeks in March 2019 where he will be using the Wysing Polyphonic Recording Studio.

Argianas' interdisciplinary practice encompasses sculpture, painting, text, performance and music. His work draws on his musical background and is concerned with the physicality of sculpture and the immateriality of performed lyrics or poetry. Interested in how a song can physically occupy a space, or how a natural form can generate a piece of music, Argianas employs clay as a cast material, transforming it into electroformed copper or jesmonite to create reliefs based on poems and the structure and cycle of songs.

The Freelands Lomax Ceramics Fellowship was launched in 2017 and offers an annual residency at Camden Arts Centre, followed by an exhibition. Argianas is the second recipient of the Fellowship.

Supported by Freelands Foundation.

For more information, please visit the Camden Arts Centre website, here.

Biography

Athanasios Argianas (b. 1976, Athens) lives and works in London and Athens since 1997. Argianas' recent exhibitions include: Line, Lisson Gallery, London, The Promise Of Total Automation, Kunsthalle Wien Antidoron, Documenta 14 at Friedricianum, Kassel, readingmachinesmovingmachines (solo) at On Stellar Rays, New York, Art Of Sound, at Fondazione Prada, Ca Corner, Venice, The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, St Louis, MO. In 2012 his work was featured in The Imminence of Poetics – The 30th Biennale of Sao Paulo, Pavilhão Ciccillo Matarazzo, Brazil, and at PERFORMA 13 New York a year later. He has held solo exhibitions and performances at We All Turn This Way, The Serpentine Pavilion, Serpentine Gallery, London, The Length Of A Strand Of Your Hair, Of The Width Of Your Arms, Unfolded at EMST National Museum Of Contemporary Art, Athens, The Length Of Your Arms Unfolded, the Barbican Art Gallery, London. Argianas runs Daedalus Street with Rowena Hughes, a project facilitating the development of new artworks by invited artists in their studio in Athens.

Curator in-residence Spring 2019

Taylor Le Melle will be in-residence at Wysing during spring 2019, developing a series of symposia as part of our 30th anniversary programme and which will take place in May. For more information about the symposia, please click here.

As part of a series in which we will be interrogating the role of Wysing in addressing the urgent societal issues of our time, Taylor’s residency will begin by re-visiting the 2014 programme Futurecamp, which was part of our 25th anniversary programme and within which we explored the subjects ‘Psychology and Behaviour in the Digital Age’; ‘Art and Education’; ‘A Post-Gender World’; ‘Activism, Economics and Politics Today’; and ‘Environmental and Social Consequences’.

We want to take the opportunity of the 30th anniversary to explore subjects that we did not address in 2014. We ask where we are as a society now and how issues that inform our current conditions within the arts, could be addressed, and where Wysing needs to concentrate its focus over the next five years.

The 2019 Curator in-Residence is supported by Art Fund. 

Biography

Taylor Le Melle is a curator and writer based in London who has programmed at: Serpentine Galleries, ICA London, Cafe Oto, Chisenhale Dance Space, Arcadia Missa, and Assembly Point (all London), L’IceBergues with Contrechamps Ensemble (Geneva) and McKenna Museum of Art (New Orleans). Taylor’s writing has been featured in: Art Monthly, Flash Art. Taylor is the Autumn/Winter 2018 Writer in Residence at Jerwood Visual Arts.

Taylor also co-runs PSS with Rowan Powell. Together they have published projects by Daniella Valz Gen, Victoria Sin and Rehana Zaman (upcoming, 2019).

Since April 2018, Taylor has been co-director of not/nowhere, an artist workers’ cooperative that hosts workshops, screenings, exhibitions and other events. not/nowhere’s mission is to ensure that local artists who use new media in their work can access film and media equipment, acquire skills to nourish their practices, and take pleasure in expressing themselves creatively.

Artist in-Residence
Summer 2019

In the lead up to our annual music festival, Cairo based multi-instrumentalist, producer, and sound artist, ZULI, will be in-residence in our onsite recording studio, dveloping and recording new work.

Ahmed El Ghazoly aka  ZULI, is a multi-instrumentalist, producer, and sound artist from Cairo, Egypt. He is co-founder of Kairo is Koming (KIK), a collective of six artists that played an important role in the rise of the city’s underground electronic music scene. Together with Asem Tag ($$$TAG$$$), ZULI also co-headed Cairo’s alternative music venue and club, VENT, from 2013-2015, before transforming their project into a namesake club night and festival. Around the same time, VENT London was run at the now closed Dance Tunnel venue by a third partner, Mohamed Elshourbagui.

ZULI released his debut EP,  Bionic Ahmed, with Lee Gamble’s UIQ label, following up with another playfully unconventional release,  Numbers and Trigger Finger for Haunter Records.

His recent release for UIQ - ‘Terminal’ - features prominent Egyptian rapper Abyusif, newcomers Abanoub, Mado $am and R-Rhyme, and the mysterious Mecca-based vocalist MSYLMA.

It sees him broadening out his work on previous EPs into something more localized and personal. The project features photography from his local zones in Cairo. Musically with ‘Terminal’ ZULI’s focus moves away from the dancefloor towards more melodic/ambient/ listening territories.

Artist in-Residence
Autumn/Winter 2019-2020

Helen Cammock is in-residence at Wysing during autumn and winter 2019-2020, when she will explore the Wysing archives to reflect the organisation’s location and history as part of our 30th birthday programme. 

Helen Cammock works across moving image, photography, writing, poetry, spoken word, song, performance, printmaking and installation. She is interested in histories, storytelling and the excavation, re-interpretation and re-presentation of lost, unheard and buried voices. Helen uses her own writing, literature, poetry, philosophical and other found texts, often mapping them onto social and political situations.

Cammock's new work has been commissioned by us as part of our 30th birthday programme and formed the basis of an exhibition, They Call It Idlewild that opened at Wysing on 29 February 2020. For more information about They Call It Idlewild, please click here.

Helen Cammock's residency and exhibition are supported by Arts Council England and Art Fund. 

Biography 

Helen Cammock’s work has recently been screened as part of the Serpentine Cinema Series and Tate Artists Moving Image Screening Programme. She has exhibited at venues including Cubitt, London; Galerie Futura Alpha Nova, Berlin; The Tetley, Leeds; Open Source Contemporary Arts Festival; Hollybush Gardens, London; 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning, London; VOID, Derry; Reading International; and The Whitechapel Gallery, London. She has written for Photoworks and Aperture magazine and was shortlisted for the Bridport poetry prize in 2015. Her work has been published in The Photographers’ Gallery journal Loose Associations and in an artist book and vinyl 12” Moveable Bridge with Bookworks, London. 

Cammock was co-director of Brighton Photo Fringe Festival for 4 years. She is currently working on a new project with Serpentine Galleries and a Film and Video Umbrella, London and Touchstones, Rochdale commission. She won the 2018 Max Mara Art Price for Women and is joint-winner of the 2019 Turner Prize.

June and July

During June and July Korean potter Hyumin Shin, curator Jina Lee and designer Jungyou Choi, will be in-residence as part of a project developed with Grizedale Arts.

We have been working with Grizedale Arts as part of a UK Korea residency exchange which saw UK artists Aaron Angell and Mark Essen visit Korea in April of 2018. 

During the trip they met Master potter Gyung-kyun Shin, black bamboo master Seonhui Choe, and chef Gae-hwa Lim, who have been working with UK designer/maker Tom Philipson and Grizedale Arts on developing products that can be made 'in common ownership'.

The product designs will be further evolved into a ‘family’ of products at Wysing by Jungyou Choi, Jina Lee and Hyunmin Shin, during a residency at Wysing in June and July. 

The UK-Korea residency exchange is funded by Arts Council Korea (ARKO) and Arts Council of England. 

Jungyou Choi graduated from Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands. Through her practice, she dissolves her language into her design. She designs sensually using materials familiar to the hand. It has formed in a variety of products, such as objects that emphasizing processes of experiments, objects that modernize traditional materials, objects used in everyday life. They are in simple forms, but they want to convey emotions through color or texture. As she has been interested in daily life and localities, she was able to participate projects in India, Nepal, Namibia, and Vietnam for several years. Then she left to Lausanne, Switzerland in 2015 and returned with the Master degree of Design for Luxury and Craftsmanship at the ECAL(Lausanne University of the Arts). She is working as an independent designer and has been carrying out diverse projects, lecturing and expanding her boundaries.

Jina Lee majored in exhibition design, folklore, and curating. Some of the exhibitions she has curated include Flower Letters, Depicting Today (Gallery Cott, 2006), the two shows Born as Tree, Live as Man and Trees with Expressions (Mokin Museum, 2007), and Cartoon World (Seoul Olympic Museum of Art, 2012). She was in charge of the Cheolsan-dong Project of Art in City 2006; the Mokin Museum’s Craft: Form on Life exhibition at the 2007 Cheongju International Craft Biennale; the Korean Cultural Center UK’s Media Landscape, Zone East exhibition at the 2010 Liverpool Biennale; and the 2011 Seoul Photo Festival. She has also coordinated international exhibitions of the 4th Anyang Public Art Project(2013-2014); Korean design and craft projects of Arumjigi Culture Keepers Foundation(2015-2017); Southeast Asian design exhibition of Gwangju Design Biennale(2017). She has been working for Grizedale Arts since 2014; The Nuisance of Landscape (Abbot Hall, 2014); The Politics of Craft: After Ford 151(Glasgow School of Art, 2015); A Fair Land (Museum of Modern Art Ireland, 2016).

Hyunmin Shin is the 3rd generation potter from Janganyo which is a famous pottery family based on Gijang (Busan), South of Korea. He was naturally brought up to be a potter living in the pottery family, and started working in Janganyo since 16years old. His father, Master potter Mr. Gyung Kyun Shin incorporates his own modern interpretation as he utilizes the same traditional techniques inherited from his father, famed ceramicist Jung Hee Shin, who recreated Goryeo ceramics in the 1960s and 1970s. Traveling through the mountains in the southern part of Korea, Mr. Shin has expanded the breadth of his pieces using the clay and wood unique to the area. Enduring the heat as the clay transforms into unique masterpieces, Shin’s ceramics radiate traditional beauty with a contemporary touch as they come out of the wood-fired kiln, a true display of Korea’s natural beauty. Delicate and stylish yet practical, Shin’s ceramics is the perfect bridge between traditional art and modern living. Hyunmin Shin participated in Master potter Gyung-Kyun Shin’s exhibition in UNESCO in France, 2014 and has been carrying on the philosophy and will of his famaily.

May, June and July

We are pleased to welcome Tito Valery as an artist-in-residence this month. To arrange his residency, we worked in collaboration with the Artists at Risk network to enable Valery to temporarily leave Cameroon.

Find out more about the Artists at Risk network here.

As a photographer, public figure and media personality, Tito Valery (b. 1982, Cameroon) has written, hosted and directed the socio-political radio talkshow W.A.K.A (where African Knowledge Applies) and the television shows " Ya'Mo, (To enjoy Africa) Goodmorning Cameroon, the Break and @W.a.k.a. In December 2017, Valery co-wrote and co-hosted an apolitical wake-up/consciousness awakening radio show with French speaking Rapper & political activist Valsero.

Through his work, Valery draws attention to social issues and the inequities and oppressive measures taken by the Cameroonian Government. In 2015 he self-financed the exhibition 'The Northern Survivors' that drew attention to the situation of Cameroonian refugees in the northern part of the country who were courageously fleeing the terrorist group Boko Haram.

During the opening of Documenta 14 in Athens 2017, he was one of the programmers for Cameroon on the Documenta radio programme curated by Bonaventure Ndikung of Savvy Contemporary. 

As part of the broadcast Valery spoke about the oppressive situation and internet shut down in southern Cameroon and called on art institutions to engage in alternative communications outlets - to create community radio stations to help artists channel their ideas and works despite the oppressive measures of the government which are mainly experienced through the excessive use of force and police brutality on Buea University students and Anglophone Cameroonians. 

Valery has shown his works and contributed to major festivals and institutions such as Documenta 14, Athens 2017, Performa 17, New York as a co-writer and performer on the TRACEY ROSE SHOW. He has had numerous solo and group shows such as The Northern Survivors, 2016 and Hands, Triangle Ouest group photo exhibition OFF Dakart Biennale, Villa Ovata Dakar, 2014. In 2014 he was among the ten artists selected for the 'Asiko' curatorial residency hosted by CCA (Centre for Contemporary Art), Lagos.

AR-Residency Wysing Arts Centre is a cooperation between Wysing Arts Centre and Artists at Risk (AR). AR-Residents are facilitated by AR, and commissioned by Wysing Arts Centre with funding from Arts Council England.The Secretariat of Artists at Risk (AR) is funded by the Kone Foundation.

November

Liv Wynter will work with a script writer and stage hand to develop a new installation and performance piece. 

Liv Wynter is an artist, educator, activist and writer from South London. They graduated from BA Fine Art at Goldsmiths in 2015 and were Artist in Residence at Tate Britain and Tate Modern on the Education Programme 2017-18, and Artist Facilitator with Indigo Youth at Hackney Museum August 2017 - March 2018.

Wynter recently competed a residency called "How Much Are They Paying You" at The Royal Standard, Liverpool, and led a group show exploring text and performance called "Enter: Greek Chorus Into The Echo Chamber" at the David Roberts Art Foundation.

They are a founding member of WHEREISANAMENDIETA and stands in solidarity with Sisters Uncut, London Anti Raids, Action for Trans Health, and any other grassroots organisation fighting austerity and oppression. Wynter is also in a gnarly a f punk band called Militant Girlfriend.  

October

Leah Clements and collaborators Rebecca Bligh, Uma Breakdown, Elena Colman, Alice Hattrick and Lizzy Rose will form a new network of art practitioners who identify as ‘crip’, disabled, or otherwise non-conforming to standard ideas of good health.

Leah Clements is an artist based in London. Her practice is concerned with emotional experiences, the relationship between the psychological and the physical, and instances of self-loss into other people or worlds. Self/other boundaries and collective identities, the subconscious, and the impact of emotion on the body have been explored through collapse (prelude) at Muddy Yard (2017), we felt the presence of someone else at Jupiter Woods (2016), Beside Chisenhale Gallery Online Commission (2016), Beside at Chisenhale Gallery (2015), You Promised Me Poems, Vitrine (2015), and The Empath Project at Res.

She is an artist in residence at space, London on the Art + Technology programme where she has been working on a VR game titled sick bed, and will be an artist in residence at Rupert, Vilnius in June 2018.

Uma Breakdown is a Gateshead based artist and researcher concerned with the economies of horror, production and the nonhuman.

They have worked extensively in disability pedagogy and are presently an AHRC funded practice based art PhD candidate at Northumbria University with the research title “Understanding an Art practice of Mucosal Play: Abject Waste, Ahuman Desire, and Difference”. Recent projects and presentations include online commission "The Inhuman Ecstasy of Toxic Waste” for http://www.wormrefuse.org/ (2018), solo exhibition “Creature of Havok” at Serf, Leeds (2017), group exhibition “Janusware” at Res. Gallery, London (2017), video presentation "The Heartbeat of Kong or More Mouse Bites" at The Royal Geographical Society, London (2016), and collaborative exhibition with artist Alfie Strong "Green Fuzz" at Xero, Kline & Coma, London (2016).

Recent publications included in “Lossy Ecology”, edited by Louisa Martin and published by Flat Time House 2017, and "The Body That Remains", edited by Emmy Beber and published by Punctum in 2018.

Rebecca Bligh is a London-based editor and writer. Amongst other things, she co-founded, and co-edits living in the future, a journal of sf / future-oriented art and writing.  

Elena Colman is an artist based in London. Her practice explores the creation of temporary social spaces in order to explore concepts such as work/life balance, behavioural ethics in dating and what it means to break the binary of private and public life. At the moment she’s excited by hobbyism, wild yeast harvesting and the radical potential of gossip. Current projects include #makehomebrewfemme , a practice based research project exploring kitchen-based, non-industrial, fermentation and infusion processes and the social role of alcohol in art events. She is the founder of Ladette Space , a DIY project space in her flat which ran from 2014-17 and continues as a publishing house. She is currently studying on the MA course at the Slade School of Fine Art.

Alice Hattrick writes essays and criticism about art, scent, family ties, and health. She is currently working on her first non-fiction book on the subject of gendered illness and mother-daughter relationships, titled Ill Feelings. 

Lizzy Rose lives and works in Margate, Kent. Her work is diverse, spanning video, photography, ceramics, drawing, writing, curating and online blogging. Rose broadly explores community, landscape, British identity and hidden culture. She has a severe form of Crohns disease which impacts her daily life. She has spent the last 12 months in hospital, documented through Instagram @rozequartz. Lizzy Rose is an Associate Member of Open School East 2017.

She graduated from BA Fine Art at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in 2010. Rose worked with Matthew de Pulford and Paul Hazelton at LIMBO, an artist-led project space, from 2013-2015 and recently she has contributed to the programming team at Crate in Margate.  

September

Sonic Cyberfeminisms (Robin Buckley, Annie Goh, Marlo De Lara, Jane Frances Dunlop, Natalie Hyacinth, Miranda Iossifidis, Louise Lawlor, Frances Morgan, Shanti Suki Osman and Marie Thompson) will develop a series of podcasts, broadcasts and a zine. 

Sonic Cyberfeminisms is an ongoing project by an open collective of artists, musicians and writers, which draws upon intersectional feminist praxis and the legacies of cyberfeminism. The project aims to foreground agendas of social justice in the domains of sound, gender and technology and, in doing so, develop critical cultural work.

The project was initiated by Annie Goh and Marie Thompson. Current Sonic Cyberfeminisms participants include Robin Buckley, Marlo De Lara, Jane Frances Dunlop, Natalie Hyacinth, Miranda Iossifidis, Louise Lawler, Frances Morgan and Shanti Suki Osman.  

August

Camae Ayewa, aka Moor Mother, will be in-residence ahead of Wysing’s 2018 music festival, on Saturday 1 September, at which she will be performing. 

Camae Ayewa (Moor Mother) is a national and international touring musician, poet, visual artist, and workshop facilitator, and has performed at numerous festivals, colleges, galleries, and museums around the world, sharing the stage with King Britt, Roscoe Mitchell, Claudia Rankine, Bell Hooks, and more. Camae is a vocalist in three collaborative performance groups: Irreversible Entanglements, Moor Jewelry and 700bliss.   

As a soundscape and visual artist, Ayewa’s work has been featured at Baltic Biennale, Samek Art Museum, Vox Populi, Pearlman Gallery, Metropolitan Museum of Art Chicago, ICA Philadelphia, Bergan Kunstall, Hirshorn Gallery, and in an upcoming 2018 solo show at The Kitchen NYC.  As a workshop facilitator, Camae has presented at Cornell University, MOFO Festival, Moogfest, Black Dot Gallery and others. Camae is co-founder and curator of Rockers Philly Project a 10-year long running event series and festival focused on marginalized musicians and artists spanning multiple genres of music. 

As Moor Mother she released her debut album Fetish Bones on Don Giovanni records to critical acclaim. Fetish Bones was named 3rd best album of the year by The Wire Magazine, number 1 by Jazz Right Now and has appeared on numerous end of the year list from Pitchfork, Noisy, Rolling Stone, and Spin Magazine. Moor Mother was named by Rolling Stone as one of the 10 artists to watch in 2016 and named Bandcamp ’ s 2016 artist of the year.   Moor Mother released a 2nd LP called the Motionless Present commissioned by CTM X VINYL FACTORY 2017. 

Moor Mother has appeared in the Quietus, Interview Magazine, The Guardian, Crack, Pitchfork and others.  Moor Mother’s schedule has included Berhaign, Borealis, CTM Festival, Le Guess Who, Unsound, Flow and Donau Festival, Rewire, Boiler Room and MOMA PS1. As a durational performance artist Camae has been commissioned by Moog Festival, Vox Populi Gallery, Icebox Gallery and others.

Camae is also a writer and poet her first book of poetry called Fetish Bones released on The AfroFuturist Affair small press.  As a member of Black Quantum Futurism Collective (BQF), she has been a part of two literary works and several zines, and has been featured in exhibitions at the Schomburg Center, Rebuild Foundation, Temple Contemporary at Tyler School of Art, and Serpentine Gallery and more. 

Camae Ayewa is a 2016 Leeway Transformation Awardee, a Blade of Grass 2016 Fellow as part of Black Quantum Futurism, 2017 Pew Fellow, and 2017 The Kitchen Inaugural Emerging Artist Awardee, and Rad Girls 2016 philly artist of the year. She has been an in artist in residency at West Philadelphia Neighborhood Time Exchange and WORM! Rotterdam residency, and featured with Black Quantum Futurism at Transmediale Festival in Berlin 2017.

August, November and December

Rachael Rosen will be working with a small team of coders and performers, including Henry Rodrick, to develop a performance and playable archive for pOrtals; an ongoing collaborative world building and storytelling exercise.  

Rachael Rosen Ltd Ed. is a transmedia artist from the UK who makes use of sound environments and possible play spaces to explore the fissure between author/ reader and online/offline environments.

Rosen is known for her atmospheric live sound collage, as well as her ongoing project pOrtals, a world-building and storytelling exercise, which began in 2014 and has included collaborative output with Quantum Natives and Werkflow. She presents HYPHEN, a monthly one-hour radio show of sound and commentary exploring the grey matter between games-music-art-literature for CAMP, a residency programme and online radio initiated by the founders of FUSE Arts Space, Bradford.

She has recently been an artist in residence at Rupert, Vilnius LT (2017); performed commissioned work at Issue Project Room, New York (2017), New Forms Festival, Vancouver (2016), and the ICA, London (2015); and presented work created during residency at The Banff Centre as part of group show, Vaporents at VOIDOID Archive, Glasgow (2016). 

Henry Rodrick, a Swedish computer programmer and DJ based in North London. He studied Computer Science at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and electroacoustic music at EMS (the centre for Swedish electroacoustic music and sound-art). Before relocating to London, he spent several years connecting the dots between electronic dance music and experimental sounds on the Stockholm club scene.

He has previously released music on labels such as Studio Barnhus, done a live mix live for Rinse FM, and is currently developing software systems for unconventional DJing and sound art, such as http://sourceofsomecertainty.com, a collaboration with Corinna Triantafyllidis, which was performed New River Studios in London earlier this year.  
 

July and August

Anna McMahon and Salote Tawale will research and develop new UK networks, including accessing collections of Fijian cultural objects held in Cambridge University Museums and developing a podcast series through interviews on gender, race, post-colonial theory, queerness, family, and food. 

Anna McMahon currently lives and works in Sydney, Australia. Working site-specifically, McMahon's installations explore ways in which space can be prepared, occupied, contested, altered & changed over time. Using organic plant matter she re-examines through her own queer experience the architecture of significant moments in her life. McMahon is the recipient of the 2017 Parramatta City Council Creative Fellowship and 2016 Freedman Foundation Travelling Art Scholarship. 

Salote Tawale currently lives and works in Sydney, Australia. Cultural identity is a central focus in her research. The inherent conflict of being from a mixed heritage (Fiji and Australia) that simultaneously includes, and excludes, Tawale from a dominant postcolonial narrative of contemporary Australia is a significant consideration in her practice. Tawale is the recipient of the 2017 Arts New South Wales Fellowship, and the 2016 Sainsbury Sculpture award that supported her residency at the Banff Center, Canada. 

May, September, November and December

Joe Moran will work over three residencies with dancers and dramaturges to develop a body of research traversing expanded choreography, discourse and form conceived in a spirit of urgency, collectivity and self-definition.  

Joe Moran is a British-Irish choreographer with a wide-ranging practice incorporating touring theatre and gallery works, lecture-performance and curatorial projects. His work tackles contemporary propositions in dance, performance and critical thought.

Recent commissions and performances include On The Habit of Being Oneself, Sadler’s Wells (Sept 2017), Indefinite Article, Whitechapel Gallery (July 2017), New Art Gallery Walsall (2017)’ Live Creations, a performance-based exhibition at Delfina Foundation (2016), A Setup, Block Universe/fig-2 at the ICA (2015) in collaboration with sculptor Eva Rothschild, David Roberts Art Foundation (Frieze 2014), Nottingham Contemporary (2014)’ Assembly (UK tour, 2014), The Modulated Body (2103) Ordovas gallery commission for its Bacon/Rodin exhibition, and The Place Prize (2013).

His first drawing exhibition Tracks and Lines was presented at Gallery Lejeune in 2015.

Joe is Artistic Director of Dance Art Foundation through which his performance and curatorial work is produced, Dance4 Associate Artist, Sadler’s Wells Summer University Artist (2015-2018) and was a UK Associate at Delfina Foundation (2016). He curated Dance Art Foundation’s two-year research programme Why Everyone Wants What We’ve Got and organises its ongoing Dance Critical Theory Group. As a dancer Joe worked with many distinguished choreographers including Deborah Hay (USA), Siobhan Davies (UK), Florence Peake (UK) and Pontus Pettersson (Sweden). His adaptation of Deborah Hay’s solo At Once and lecture-performance on the work has toured widely in the UK and internationally.

Upcoming projects include Kettle’s Yard with Eva Rothschild for Fig Futures (Sept-Oct 2018) and the first stand-alone tour of Moran’s all-male work Arrangement.

May

Julia Crabtree & William Evans who were previously in residence in 2014 will return to Wysing for a research retreat with, Katrina Black, Jamie Bracken Lobb, Angela Chan, Lilah Fowler, Karen Kramer, Alice Hattrick, Rachel Pimm and Jamie Sutcliffe.

Tracts, a weekend of discussion, presentations, walks and cooking with a mix of artists, writers and researchers, growers, foragers and carers to use this retreat as an informal and open structure to share work and research, exploring kin, environment, ecologies, bodies and care as well as the structure of the retreat; communal cooking and living, as a means of collective learning.

Julia Crabtree & William Evans primarily work as makers exploring materiality and embodiment through sculpture, print and film. Recent commissions include Gullet at Cell Project Space, ‘Crutch’ exhibited as part of Maximum Overdrive at Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea (2017), Gulch, Walter Phillips Gallery, Canada (2016), Antonio Bay, South London Gallery (2014) and Hyper Bole Legion TV, London (2014).

They were recipients of the Nina Stewart Residency award at South London Gallery (2014), The Future Residency, at Wysing Art Centre, Cambridge (2014) and the Mary Hofsetter Legacy Scholarship for the New Materiality residency at Banff Centre, Canada (2016). They are currently Somerset House Studio Residents and have an upcoming solo show at Fluent, Santandar, Spain.

Their residency has been supported with a Grant for the Arts from Arts Council England in partnership with Cell Project Space. 

March, April and August

Phoebe Collings-James and Jamila Johnson-Small have developed a new collaborative work which will be performed, for the first time, in our music festival on 1 September.

Sound as Weapon, Sounds 4 Survival
By Phoebe Collings-James and Last Yearz Interesting Negro

Life grows between the cracks of this current flesh

Charting psycho-emotional landscapes and mapping them on to the physical we work with our multi-dimensional bodies as the primary technology and source material for a collaborative live performance work that is embodied through a symbiotic relationship between dance, music and sculpture. The group form a chorus centred around a conceptual deconstruction of ‘percussion’ as it functions instrumentally and also as a radical proposition to the various ways you could think about the power of ‘striking an object’ and the impact of the sonic as resonating frequencies and vibrations. Our bodies navigate the sensory labour of their being ‘played’.

For this performance Phoebe Collings-James and Jamila Johnson-Small are joined by Yasmine Akim, Onyeka Igwe and Katarzyna Perlak.

In my mind the process of ceramics becomes enzyme like in its ability to facilitate a movement in the object and all those who interact with it. I could call them live and active gut cultures or subaltern spirit guides or the detritus of devotional memorabilia. Wrapping green and yellow fungi around them, letting language starve them of breath. But I will not. I will leave it for you to read, in your arms to hold. Or drop.- Phoebe Collings-James

Navigating ‘the gaze’, and I do not mean this as something singular, is survival work that all ‘othered’ bodies are obliged to do. Within my work I try to make space to have different kinds of relations because it is temporarily my house, my church, my empire – a certain kind of fragile, unknown and precarious sanctuary with the audience as a crucial part of the energetic and physical environment - Jamila Johnson-Small

March, June and September

Formerly Called (Tamar Clarke-Brown, Ibrahim Cissé, Atum Farah, Cédric Fauq, Georgia Lucas-Going, Elijah Maja, Olu Ogunnaike, Cindy Sissokho, Kefiloe Siwisa, Dominique White and others) will meet at Wysing across three retreats to reinforce their existing network of People of Colour operating within the visual arts.

Formed as a working-group in 2016, Formerly Called was a project devised for the London branch of the Northern Winter Workshops, initiated by artists Dorine van Meel and Nelmarie du Preez with the support of curator Rachael Harlow, prefiguring the Southern Summer School – a public program which took place at BAK, Utrecht (17.02 – 24.02.2017).

The Southern Summer School (SSS) / The Northern Winter Workshops (NWW) were collective projects that brought together art practitioners and cultural workers based in South Africa, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, around questions of decolonisation, art, and social justice.

In order to address London’s local context Formerly Called was formed by curators and art producers Cédric Fauq and Ibrahim Cissé. They have held three meetings at the South London Gallery, which were semi-public events including People of Colour not only operating within the visual arts but also the fashion industry, music and design. 

March to May

Brandon Covington Sam-Sumana, aka N-Prolenta, will be in-residence for two months during which time they will produce a monograph that will incorporate fifteen short essays. 

Multimedia artist and producer Brandon Covington Sam-Sumana, also known as N-Prolenta, works to interrogate matters related to currency, transience, narrative structure, and system metabolism.

Covington's interrogations have spawned music projects, objects of generative design, forays into speculative finance, video, and visual art. They were recently commissioned by Rhizome and the New Museum for First Look: New Black Portraitures, an online exhibition interrogating the genre of portraiture in relationship to Blackness, exploring the complexities and violence endemic to this territory.

February, June, August and November

Tessa Norton and her family will be in-residence four times during 2018 and will explore how the experience of parenthood has changed her perception of time, and the implications that this renewed perspective has for thinking about art.

Tessa Norton works primarily with text and events, incorporating humour, theory and parody. Her work at Wysing will investigate the disruption to time experienced in early parenthood. Tessa Norton has previously given readings at The Tetley and Liverpool Biennial. Past projects and events include The Pure Ideology Personal Brand Workshop (Legion TV, London), Lustre Fabrics (Saltaire Arts Trail, Yorkshire), Award Machine (Grrr, London).

Her writing has appeared in various publications including The Wire, Corridor 8, LAUGH, Hoax and Art Licks. She also works at Cecil Sharp House in London and is a board member at LUX artists film. She is based between London and West Yorkshire. 

January and February

During January and February we will be hosting Nastja Säde Rönkkö in residence at Wysing. This research residency has been supported by Frame Finland, HIAP and The Finnish Institute in London.

Nastja Säde Rönkkö (b. 1985, Helsinki, Finland) works independently and in the collective LaBeouf, Rönkkö & Turner. Her work has been exhibited in numerous festivals, exhibitions and screenings.

Rönkkö has exhibited and performed in major establishments and museums such as Sydney Opera House, Australia, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and FACT Foundation of Art and Technology, Liverpool, UK.

During her residency Rönkkö will be developing an ambitious new work that will be realised during 2018. Rönkkö's residency was postponed from autumn 2017 due to personal reasons and she will be at Wysing with her family.

Throughout 2018 we will host artists in-residence working across a range of practices who will be developing new work within an atmosphere of collaboration.

Artists will be working from Wysing over multiple visits across the year, and many will be bringing an existing group or peer network with them. Others will be using the opportunity to convene a new group, or to be in-residence with their children.

The selected artists work across a range of media and disciplines including visual art, writing, choreography, dance, music and sound, and in their work address issues such as family, disability, race and racism, gender, identity and sexuality. The artists will be travelling to Wysing from across the UK, Europe, the USA and Australia. 

Cover image: Joe Moran, 'Arrangement'. Photo: David Edwards

The 2018 artists in-residence are:

Camae Ayewa, aka Moor Mother.
Leah Clements with Rebecca Bligh, Uma Breakdown, Elena Colman, Alice Hattrick and Lizzy Rose.
Phoebe Collings James and Last Yearz Interesting Negro/Jamila Johnson-Small.
Brandon Covington Sam-Sumara, aka N-Prolenta.
Julia Crabtree & William Evans.
Formerly Called (Ibrahim Cissé , Atum Farah, Cédric Fauq, Georgia Lucas-Going, Elijah Maja, Olu Ogunnaike, Cindy Sissokho, Kefiloe Siwisa, Dominique White and others).
Anna McMahon and Salote Tawale.
Joe Moran and collaborators.
Sonic Cyberfeminisms (Annie Goh, Marlo De Lara, Jane Frances Dunlop, Natalie Hyacinth, Miranda Iossifidis, Frances Morgan, Shanti Suki Osman and Marie Thompson).
Tessa Norton and family.
Nastja Säde Rönkkö and family.
Rachael Rosen and collaborators.
Tito Valery.
Liv Wynter and collaborators.

Joe Moran will work with dancers and dramaturges to develop a body of research traversing expanded choreography, discourse and form conceived in a spirit of urgency, collectivity and self-definition. 

Tessa Norton and family will be in-residence during which Norton will explore how the experience of parenthood has changed her perception of time, and the implications that this renewed perspective has for thinking about art. Norton works primarily with text and events, incorporating humour, theory and parody. 

Nastja Säde Rönkkö and family will be in-residence during which Rönkkö will be developing an ambitious new project to be realised in 2018. Rönkkö’s residency has been supported by Frame Finland, HIAP and The Finnish Institute in London.

Rachael Rosen, working with a small team of coders and performers including Henry Rodrick, will develop a performance and playable archive for pOrtals; an ongoing collaborative world building and storytelling exercise.

Sonic Cyberfeminisms (Annie Goh, Marlo De Lara, Jane Frances Dunlop, Natalie Hyacinth, Miranda Iossifidis, Frances Morgan, Shanti Suki Osman and Marie Thompson) will develop a series of podcasts, broadcasts and a zine.

We are pleased to welcome Tito Valery as an artist-in-residence this month. To arrange his residency, we worked in collaboration with the Artists at Risk network to enable Valery to temporarily leave Cameroon.

Liv Wynter will work with a script writer and stage hand to develop a new installation and performance piece. Wynter is a founding member of WHEREISANAMENDIETA and stands in solidarity with Sisters Uncut, London Anti Raids, Action for Trans Health, and grassroots organisation fighting austerity and oppression. 

Throughout 2018 we will host artists in-residence working across a range of practices who will be developing new work within an atmosphere of collaboration.

Artists will be working from Wysing over multiple visits across the year, and many will be bringing an existing group or peer network with them. Others will be using the opportunity to convene a new group, or to be in-residence with their children.

The selected artists work across a range of media and disciplines including visual art, writing, choreography, dance, music and sound, and in their work address issues such as family, disability, race and racism, gender, identity and sexuality. The artists will be travelling to Wysing from across the UK, Europe, the USA and Australia. 

Cover image: Last Yearz Interesting Negro/ Jamila Johnson-Small

The 2018 artists in residence are:

Camae Ayewa, aka Moor Mother.
Leah Clements with Rebecca Bligh, Uma Breakdown, Elena Colman, Alice Hattrick and Lizzy Rose.
Phoebe Collings James and Last Yearz Interesting Negro/Jamila Johnson-Small.
Brandon Covington Sam-Sumara, aka N-Prolenta.
Julia Crabtree & William Evans.
Formerly Called (Tamar Clarke-Brown, Ibrahim Cissé, Atum Farah, Cédric Fauq, Georgia Lucas-Going, Elijah Maja, Olu Ogunnaike, Cindy Sissokho, Kefiloe Siwisa, Dominique White and others).
Anna McMahon and Salote Tawale.
Joe Moran and collaborators.
Sonic Cyberfeminisms (Annie Goh, Marlo De Lara, Jane Frances Dunlop, Natalie Hyacinth, Miranda Iossifidis, Frances Morgan, Shanti Suki Osman and Marie Thompson).
Tessa Norton and family.
Nastja Säde Rönkkö and family.
Rachael Rosen and collaborators.
Tito Valery
Liv Wynter and collaborators.

Camae Ayewa will be in-residence ahead of Wysing’s 2018 music festival at which she will be performing. Ayewa is a poet, a musician performing under the name Moor Mother, and co-founder of the Black Quantum Futurism collective. 

Leah Clements and collaborators Rebecca Bligh, Uma Breakdown, Elena Colman, Alice Hattrick and Lizzy Rose will form a new network of art practitioners who identify as ‘crip’, disabled, or otherwise non-conforming to standard ideas of good health.

Phoebe Collings-James and Last Yearz Interesting Negro/ Jamila Johnson-Small will create a collaborative work embodied through a symbiotic relationship between dance, music and sculpture, asking what an anti-assimilationist practice might look and sound like in 2018.

Brandon Covington Sam-Sumana, aka N-Prolenta, will produce a monograph that will incorporate fifteen short essays. Sam-Sumana was recently commissioned by Rhizome and the New Museum for First Look: New Black Portraitures, an online exhibition interrogating the genre of portraiture in relationship to Blackness.

Julia Crabtree & William Evans, previous residency artists returning to Wysing to work with invited collaborators to expand upon key themes from recent research including botany, fungal ecologies, co-evolving, feminist sci-fi, bodies and critters. Their residency has been supported with a Grant for the Arts from Arts Council England in partnership with Cell Project Space.

Formerly Called (Tamar Clarke-Brown, Ibrahim Cissé, Atum Farah, Cédric Fauq, Georgia Lucas-Going, Elijah Maja, Olu Ogunnaike, Cindy Sissokho, Kefiloe Siwisa, Dominique White, and others) will meet at Wysing across several retreats to reinforce their existing network of People of Colour operating within the visual arts. 

Anna McMahon and Salote Tawale will research and develop new UK networks, including accessing collections of Fijian cultural objects held in Cambridge University Museums and developing a podcast series through interviews on gender, race, post-colonial theory, queerness, family, and food.

Throughout 2018 we will offer our site and resources to artists working across a range of practices who wish to develop new work within an atmosphere of collaboration.

The deadline for applications for 2018 residencies is midnight (GMT) on Monday 11 December 2017. 

To apply click here.

We have changed how we are structuring artist residencies during 2018. Instead of offering a fixed timeframe and fee, we want to enable residencies that might last a weekend, a month, two months, a year, or over multiple visits; however long artists think they need. We do not have a fixed number of residencies in mind and will shape our programme in response to this open call.

We are interested in hearing from artists who are already working within self-organised groups who would like to use this opportunity to strengthen the group, those who want to come together for the first time to collaborate on new ideas, and artists who might want to bring their children or families.

As with all our programmes, we are keen to hear from artists who can bring a range of cultural, social, racial and gender perspectives to the programme. By ‘artists’ we mean visual artists, musicians, dancers, choreographers and writers, or those working in other disciplines that have a strong connection to the visual arts. 

To apply you will need to tell us: Your proposed dates and timeframe; Information on what you plan to do during the residency and why this is the right time for you/the project you are applying with; Information on any public elements to the residency; What other resources you need; How much funding you need .

We can offer: Our five-bedroomed farmhouse, with shared kitchen and bathrooms, that sleeps up to 10; A self-contained live/work studio that sleeps up to 4; Three studios; A music/recording studio; A ceramics studio; A large seminar/meeting room; Use of a vehicle; Funding for fees, production and travel; Access to curatorial and technical staff; An engaged and interested context, including visitors to the site and an online audience.

Applications are online via Submittable. It is recommended that you apply with enough time to approach us with any questions or queries in using the Submittable website. We are happy to accept applications that have been recorded on video or audio and uploaded onto Submittable instead of written applications. 

To apply you will need to provide

- Your proposed dates and timeframe.
- Information on what you propose to do during the residency and why this is the right time for you/the project you are applying with.
- Information on any public elements to the residency.
- Details of what resources you need from us (number of rooms, studios, etc).
- An outline budget and how much funding you need; to include fees, production and travel (we expect most residencies will be in the funding range of £500 to £5,000).
- Six examples of work by each person involved, or other relevant material.
- A current CV, or, if applying as a group, short biographies on each person.

We have prepared a FAQ sheet – download a PDF of frequently asked questions here.

16 October – 10 December

Maryam Monalisa Gharavi, Imran Perretta and Morgan Quaintance join us for the final set of residencies in 2017. The three artists work across writing, publishing, curating, music and video and as part of their residencies will be contributing to events and study days.

The dates of events are Thursday 19 October and Saturday 2 December.

Maryam Monalisa Gharavi is an artist and writer whose work explores the interplay between aesthetic and political valences in the public domain. Her work in film, video, performance, photography, drawing, sound, and text appears in a variety of international exhibitions and publications. She was previously an artist-in-resident at Delfina Foundation, London, Darat al Funun, Amman and Mansion, Beirut. In 2016 she published three books: a translation of Waly Salomão's Algaravias: Echo Chamber (Ugly Duckling Presse), the poetry volume The Distancing Effect (BlazeVOX), and the drawing/text artist publication Apparent Horizon 2 (Bonington Gallery). Gharavi is currently based in the USA.

Imran Perretta’s work addresses biopower, marginality and the (de)construction of cultural histories. His multi-disciplinary practice encompasses the moving-image, sound, performance and poetry. Recent exhibitions include brother to brother for JVA Solo Presentations, Jerwood Space, London; it wasn't a crash, in the usual sense, Arcadia Missa, London; Pale News (in collaboration with Milo van der Maaden) commissioned by the Chisenhale Gallery and performed in Victoria Park, London; 5 percent for Copenhagen Art Week, Denmark, and Devotions at MOT International Project Space, London. Perretta is based in south London.

Morgan Quaintance is a London-based writer, musician, broadcaster and curator. He is a regular contributor to Art Monthly, and a contributing editor for E-Flux’s online publishing portal art agenda. He is also a founding member of the curatorial collective DAM PROJECTS and until recently held the Cubitt Curatorial Fellowship 2016-17. Quaintance is based in London.

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.

20 March – 14 May 

Pallavi Paul, Claire Potter and Raju Rage join us for our first set of residencies in 2017. The three artists work across film, video, performance, publishing, education and activism and as part of their residencies will be contributing to events and study days.

Pallavi Paul works primarily with video and installation. Using the disruption between ‘reality image’ and ‘documentary’ as a starting point, she attempts to create a laboratory of possibilities which test the contours of fantasy, resistance, politics and history. Paul’s works have been shown at BALTIC 39 as part of the AV Festival, Newcastle, the Edinburgh Festival, the Mumbai Film Festival, Tate Modern and in the exhibition Hundred Years of Experimentation (1913- 2013) a retrospective of Indian Cinema and Video, Experimenta Film Festival, Bangalore. She is included in the forthcoming Contour Biennale 8 in Mechelen. Paul currently lives and works in New Delhi.

Claire Potter works across performance, publication, installation and film. Influenced by linguistics and performance theory, Potter's work challenges received definitions of reading, writing, and speaking, to reconsider what it is to 'articulate'. Thematically their practice is centred on the temporalities of traumatic experience, and it is through this rubric that they approach socially and politically orientated subjects such as adolescence and gender-based violence. Recent and forthcoming works include: Penmon Point, in 'No Title', CCA Derry-Londonderry; Lads of Aran, in 'The Body that Remains', Punctum Books, New York; Cast Metal Nut in 'Overlay', White Rainbow, London; CHAVSCUMBOSS, at Colour Out of Space, Brighton. Potter is from Merseyside and is currently based in Yorkshire.

Raju Rage is an interdisciplinary artist who is proactive about using art, education and activism to forge creative survival. They primarily use their non-conforming body as a vehicle of embodied knowledge; to bridge the gap between dis/connected bodies, theory and practice, text and the body and aesthetics and the political substance. They work in performance, sculpture, soundscapes and moving image, focusing on techniques of resistance and utilising everyday objects and everyday life experiences in communicating narratives around gender, race and culture. They investigate history, memory and trauma, with an emphasis on colonial legacy, its continuation and impact on the body. Raju Rage is based in London and has recently shown work visibility vs opacity at Dirty Politics Filthy Mouth, Framer Framed Amsterdam and Edinburgh's Artist Moving Image Festival, published in 'Decolonising Sexualties: Transnational Perspectives, Critical Interventions and presented at ‘Sediments and Arrhythmias: race, sense and sensation' at UCL on the body and the un/archive.

During 2017 Wysing will be exploring ‘many voices’ across all our programmes under the over-arching title Wysing Polyphonic. We invite artists, musicians and writers to apply to be in-residence within the Wysing Polyphonic context. 

To apply, click here.

Wysing Polyphonic
During 2017 Wysing will be exploring ‘many voices’ across all our programmes under the over-arching title Wysing Polyphonic.

Through residencies, exhibitions, events, study weeks and study days, we will work with a range of artists to explore a diversity of contexts and positions to help better understand the role of art, artists, and arts organisations such as Wysing, at this moment of global political change.

Throughout 2017 we will provide both a platform for many voices, in particular those that have the potential to be over-looked in the current political rhetoric, alongside a range of ways that those voices can be heard. Building on a number of events during 2016 that explored alternative sites for community and activism, we will be seeking to work with artists whose work, or whose networks, empower and support diverse communities of interest. We will also be further exploring the role of radio, broadcasting, sound and listening.

To set the context, we have invited three artists to be in-residence: US based Iranian artist and writer Maryam Monalisa Gharavi; Mumbai based artist Pallavi Paul; and London based artist Tai Shani. A further six artists will be invited to be in-residence through this open call for applications.

Other Developments in 2017
The exhibition All Channels Open will launch the Wysing Polyphonic programme and will bring together artists who were in-residence during 2016 through a synchronised arrangement of projectors, monitors, objects and surround sound in Wysing’s gallery.

In early 2017 we be will launching our first vinyl record on our new label, also entitled Wysing Polyphonic, by the band Ectopia who are artists Jack Brennan, Adam Christensen and Vicki Stieri.

Further expanding on the theme of many voices, Wysing’s annual music festival, which returns to early September 2017, will be programmed for the first time by a range of invited international collectives and contributors.

And we are excited to have been awarded funding by the Foyle Foundation to build a recording studio at Wysing in the summer of 2017. The studio will allow us to commission new works for recording and broadcasting as well as being a resource for artists and musicians. 

Residencies
Through this Open Call we are inviting artists, musicians and writers to apply to be in-residence within the Wysing Polyphonic context. We are particularly looking for artists who can bring a range of cultural, social, racial and gender perspectives to the programme, and who will enjoy participating in events as part of our public programme.

The amount of funding we have for residencies is £4,000 for each artist, to cover: an artist's fee, materials and travel, plus free on-site accommodation during the period and a free studio.

There will be three residency periods:

20 March – 14 May 2017
3 July – 20 August 2017
16 October – 10 December 2017

Please read the following guidelines before making an application:

Profile of Artists
We are particularly looking for artists, musicians and writers who can bring a range of cultural, social, racial and gender perspectives to the programme, and who will enjoy participating in events as part of our public programme

To Apply
Applications are made online via Submittable. Once you have set up an account you are able to return to your application any time up until the deadline which is midnight on Monday 16 January 2017. It is recommended that you apply with enough time to approach us with any questions or queries in using the Submittable website. We are not able to accept applications after the deadline.

You will need to provide:
A statement on your work, why you are interested in Wysing Polyphonic 2017 and what you can bring to the programme (max 1,000 words).
Six images of your work, or other relevant material.
A current CV.

We are happy to accept applications that have been recorded onto video and uploaded onto Submittable, instead of written applications. 

We are able to provide a range of workspace and accommodation and if you have any access or other needs that you wish to discuss with us before applying, please contact us on 01954 718881.

The deadline for applications is midnight on Monday 16 January 2017.

To apply, click here.

We are delighted to host the band Ectopia in-residence during 2016. Ectopia are artists Jack Brennan, Adam Christensen and Vicky Steiri and they performed an incredible set at our music festival in 2015. We have invited them back to Wysing to write and record new material for a forthcoming album, produced by as part of our new record label, Wysing Polyphonic.

Visit the band's website to find out more about them, here.

See information on last year's music festival, here.

The artists who will in-residence at Wysing during 2016 are - (spring) Beatrice Dillon, Wojciech Kosma and Florence Peake; (summer) Henna-Riikka Halonen, Evan Ifekoya, Lawrence Lek and Laura O’Neill; (autumn) Larry Achiampong, David Blandy and Gary Zhexi Zhang.

The artists work across music, performance, performative writing, text, computer game technology, video and sound, and they bring an international perspective to Wysing's programme this year. Many of the artists have a political dimension to their work and all share a commitment to working within the structure of Wysing's programme for 2016, Wysing Poly.

Scroll right to read about the artists and click for more images.

Larry Achiampong and David Blandy share an interest in popular culture and the post-colonial position; examining communal and personal heritage within their collaborative practice and using performance to investigate the self as a fiction. Achiampong and Blandy, as individual artists, have been exploring issues surrounding race and culture for many years, albeit from completely different cultural backgrounds. They have been collaborating as Biters and on the Finding Fanon series for over two years, resulting in a body of work including digital imagery, performance and video. Over the past three years, they have exhibited and performed internationally including at Fabrica, Brighton; Iniva, London; Modern Art Oxford; Spike Island, Bristol; ICI/Savvy Contemporary, Berlin, and have an upcoming exhibition at Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle. Their films are distributed by LUX and David Blandy is represented by Seventeen Gallery, London.

Beatrice Dillon is a producer, composer and musician. She has collaborated widely with a range of visual artists producing music and sound for film, performance and installation. Her recent releases Blues Dances, Face A/B and Studies for Samplers and Percussion (a collaborative LP with Rupert Clervaux) were selected for FACT, Juno Plus and Quietus’ Best of 2015. Dillon has performed and DJ’d internationally across venues and galleries including Southbank, Barbican, Tate, ICA, Palais de Tokyo Paris, Lisson, Whitechapel, Center of Contemporary Art Geneva and MONA Tasmania amongst others. In 2014, Dillon was selected for Sound And Music’s portfolio scheme. She’s produced a host of acclaimed mixes for The Trilogy Tapes, Blowing Up The Workshop and Rinse FM etc and released a split cassette with Ben UFO on Wichelroede in February 2016. Beatrice presents a monthly show on London’s NTS radio. 

Henna-Riikka Halonen has worked on and produced many collaborative large scale video projects and commissions and shown her work widely in international exhibitions and festivals such as Research pavilion, Venice Biennale 2015, You Imagine What you Desire, Biennale of Sydney 2014, Eden The Pow(d)er of Fear, Lilith Performance Studio, Malmo, Sweden, Fictitious Entry, Uqbar, Berlin, Ny Finsk Videokunst, Kunsthall, Grenland, Norway,Video Dumbo festival, Eyebeam Art + Technology Center, New York, Gallery Factory, Seoul, Korea, Saison Video, France, Transmediale, 2012, Berlin, Centre Pompidou, Paris, Festival De Nouveau Cinema, Montreal, Brussels Short film Festival, Musrara Mix, Jerusalem, Israel, Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, Berwick Gymnasium Gallery, UK, Loop Video Art Fair, Barcelona, Grim museum, Berlin, Gstaad Film festival, Switzerland, Incheon International Biennale, Korea and ARTE TV Channel (France/Germany) etc. Halonen lives and works in Helsinki and her residency has been made possible through the support of Frame Finland, HIAP and The Finnish Institute in London.

Evan Ifekoya is an interdisciplinary artist and educator, exploring the politicisation of culture, society and aesthetics. Ifekoya’s current work investigates the possibility of an erotic and poetic occupation using film, performative writing and sound, focused on co-authored, intimate forms of knowledge production and the radical potential of spectacle. Recent exhibitions include normcore, IAb, Bielefeld, Germany; All Of Us Have A Sense Of Rhythm, David Roberts Art Foundation, London; Embodied Spaces, FramerFramed, De Tolhuistuin, Amsterdam - both curated by Christine Eyene; Studio Voltaire OPEN, London and 30 years of the Future, Castlefield Gallery, Manchester (2014). Recent performances have taken place at David Roberts Art Foundation and Tate Modern, London as well as The Marlborough, Brighton and De Tolhuistuin, Amsterdam.

Wojciech Kosma explores multiple aspects of relationships and sociality, working within a performance framework and together with a number of close collaborators. The effects of this process are manifested both in the social realm and in artistic productions. Kosma’s collaborations with Dylan Aiello, Dwayne Browne, Sjoerd Dijk, Brian Doose, Gordon Douglas, Ligia Lewis, Sofia Lomba, Ewa Majewska, Irene Moray, Timothy Murray, Paulita Pappel, Llewellyn Reichman, Yunuen Rhi, Ingrid Sattes, Jessica Lauren Elizabeth Taylor and Judith Vrancken were presented at Interstate Projects in New York; Chisenhale Gallery, London; Schinkel Pavillon in Berlin; Galerie Kamm, Berlin; Human Resources, Los Angeles; Transmission, Glasgow; Outpost, Norwich; LEAP, Berlin; and Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź among others. In 2015, Kosma was the recipient of Scholarship for Visual Arts awarded by the Berlin Senate and resident artist at Triangle in New York.

Lawrence Lek uses architectural fabrication and video game software to produce virtual worlds, video performances and immersive installations, often based on real places. His work deals with the uncanny experience of simulated presence, and how themes of desire, memory, power, and immortality drive our encounters within virtual realms. Lek is a graduate of the Cooper Union, New York, the Architectural Association, London and Trinity College, Cambridge. Recent projects include Secret Surface, KW Berlin; Software, Hard Problem, Cubitt Gallery; The Uncanny Valley, Wysing; Unreal Estate, Royal Academy; Performance as Process, Delfina Foundation; Sky Line for Art Licks Weekend 2014 Digital Commission; Continental Drift, Channel Normal; Bodyscape, Parasol Unit. Lek is a resident artist at The White Building and winner of the 2015 Dazed Emerging Artist Award and ICA/Tenderflix Artist Video Award.

Laura O’Neill describes herself as "a maker and a shaker; to which I question the act of looking". Past projects include Focal Point Gallery’s Big Screen, Southend-on-Sea, 2016; Bikini Wax, Mexico City, 2015; ICA, London, 2015; Camden Art Centre, London, 2015; Baltic 39, Newcastle, 2014; Liverpool Biennale, 2014; Spike Island, Bristol, 2013 and a recent film commission from Mexico City Metro. She currently lives and works in Mexico City.

Florence Peake’s practice encompasses visual art, dance and performance. Peake works with drawing, painting and sculptural materials combined with found, appropriated and fabricated objects placed in relationship to the moving body. Site and the placement of performance and audience, live and recorded text, as well as a well-developed sense of wit and humour, are key to her work. She has shown nationally and internationally, presenting work at the National Portrait Gallery, London; BALTIC, Gateshead; Hayward Gallery as part of Mirrorcity, London; David Roberts Art Foundation, London; Yorkshire Sculpture Park; Modern Art Oxford; Chapter Arts, Cardiff; the Harris Museum, Preston; and the Herbert Museum, Coventry.

Gary Zhexi Zhang is an artist and writer whose work is concerned with private and political narratives of the virtual. Recent screenings and exhibitions include Would You Like Help at EMBASSY Gallery, Edinburgh and Tenderflix Film Festival at ICA, London. He is a regular contributor to Frieze and Elephant magazines, and is currently studying for a Masters of Philosophy in Criticism and Culture at Cambridge University.

The artists who will be in-residence at Wysing during 2015, taking the theme of The Multiverse as a starting point from which to make new work, are Kit Craig, Electra (Irene Revell), Joey Holder, Essi Kausalainen, Paul Purgas, Takeshi Shiomitsu and Erica Scourti.

Click on each of the artists' images for more work.

Perceiving the world as an organic entity; a chaotic body in which all parts are equally important, Essi Kausalainen makes works in which the space, different species of beings and ‘things’ are approached as performers and partners. Inspired by plant thinking, feminist science studies, new materialisms and quantum physics, Kausalainen creates ambiguous works in the form of gestures and actions. Essi Kausalainen (b. 1979) studied performance art and theory at Turku Arts Academy and the Theatre Academy of Finland. Her work has been exhibited and performed in venues including KIM? Contemporary Art Centre, Riga; Malmö Moderna Museet; Frankfurt Kunstverein; Museum for Contemporary Art Roskilde; Nikolaj Kunsthalle, Copenhagen and Kunstraum Bethanien, Berlin.

With the support of The Finnish Institute in London and Frame Visual Art Finland.

Kit Craig deals with the problems of how an idea or thought process can translate into an externalised form. The resulting sculptures, drawings and videos investigate this imperfect process of communication emphasising their absurd, out-of-sync and holographic nature. Recent solo exhibitions include: A Room Without Sculptures, Arcade, London, (2014), Shuffle, Parfitt Gallery, Croydon (2013), Nine Men’s Morris, La Galeria Maria Grazia del Prete, Rome, (2011). Recent group exhibitions include: Drawing Biennial, Drawing Room, London (2015/13/11); Ginko Goethe Garden, Arcade, London (2011); With words like smoke, Chelsea Space, London (2010).

Electra curates, commissions and produces projects by artists working across sound, moving image, performance and the visual arts. Through close dialogue with a range of venues and collaborators, Electra presents projects across the UK and internationally. At the heart of their practice is a process-based relationship between artist, curator and audiences, which seeks to give the projects space to find their own rhythm, public outputs, and discourse.   Electra's core aim is to foster a dialogue between a range of disciplines of contemporary artistic practice, to provide a platform for debate and engaged, dynamic investigations of urgent social, political and cultural questions. Projects include: Someone Else Can Clean Up This Mess (Flat Time House, 2014-15); Her Noise: Feminisms and the Sonic (Tate Modern, 2012); Sound Escapes (Space 2009); The Wire 25 (2007).

Joey Holder mixes elements of biology, nanotechnology and natural history against computer program interfaces, screen savers and measuring devices. Working across trans-media platforms her work operates through an ongoing state of transformation, constantly morphing and inhabiting different realms. Holder was a recent finalist for the Converse/Dazed Emerging Artist Award (2013); included in Vestige: The Future is Here, Design Museum, London (2013) and Multinatural Histories, Harvard Museum of Natural History, Massachusetts, USA (2013). Recent solo exhibitions include HYDROZOAN, The Royal Standard, part of the Liverpool Biennial program (2014) and BioSTAT. at Project Native Informant, London (2015).

Paul Purgas has a multi-disciplinary approach that brings together elements of sound and composition, architecture, industrial design and software programming. Originally trained as an architect and graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2004, he has since been based in the curatorial department at Arnolfini, Bristol and curated contemporary art and performance projects for Tate Britain, De La Warr Pavillion, Spike Island and Frieze Art Fair.  Alongside this he is also the co-founder of Emptyset with James Ginzburg, a project that operates as a meeting point for sound, architecture and performance considering full frequency audio, psychoacoustics and the legacy of Structural/Materialist production. Emptyset have produced installations for Tate Britain and the Architecture Foundation in London, and live performances at Bergen Konsthall, CTM/Transmediale and Kunsthalle Zurich.

 

Takeshi Shiomitsu questions the ways power and ideology affects our intuitive interactions with the world, particularly a rapidly technologized and networked life through exposure to images. From this source, he creates a slippery aesthetic, opening, leading to and suggesting multiples and contraries. Recent solo/two persons show Spirit Level with Jesse Darling, Andor, London, (2015); WASH, Happy Times, Milcote House, London (2014); Every line ever spoken (with Sandra Vaka Olsen), 68, Copenhagen (2014) and You Are Beautiful, LimaZulu, London (2013). Recent group exhibitions include June Snow, Evelyn Yard, London (2014); Unified Fabric, Arcadia Missa, London (2013); and Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin/Madrid, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2012). Shiomitsu has contributed to publications Palace of Peace & Reconciliation (2014) and (networked) Every Whisper Is a Crash On My Ears (2013), both published by A_M.

Erica Scourti draws on a personal biography to explore the notion of a subject aware of herself as caught within a system of techno-social representations, reflecting on questions of post-authenticity, intimacy and connection in a fully mediated world. Her work in video, performance, online and with text has been shown recently in groups shows and festivals, Transmediale 15, Haus De Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, (2015), End User, Hayward Project Space, London (2014), Soft Machines, IMPAKT Festival, Utrecht, (2014), P/N/19 Foam, a peripatetic project by Mat Jenner at Project/ Number, London, (2014), Snow Crash, Banner Repeater, London, (2014). She has also presented performances and talks at the ICA, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, DRAF and the Southbank Centre

9 November to 20 December

Our final set of residencies in 2015 start in November when artists Essi Kausalainen, Paul Purgas and Erica Scourti will re-locate to Wysing for six weeks.

An event on 21 November, with contrubitions by the artists alongside Paul Clinton, Irene Revell and Dr James Riley, will explore their work.Click for details, here.

Perceiving the world as an organic entity; a chaotic body in which all parts are equally important, Essi Kausalainen makes works in which the space, different species of beings and ‘things’ are approached as performers and partners. Inspired by plant thinking, feminist science studies, new materialisms and quantum physics, Kausalainen creates ambiguous works in the form of gestures and actions. Essi Kausalainen (b. 1979) studied performance art and theory at Turku Arts Academy and the Theatre Academy of Finland. Her work has been exhibited and performed in venues including KIM? Contemporary Art Centre, Riga; Malmö Moderna Museet; Frankfurt Kunstverein; Museum for Contemporary Art Roskilde; Nikolaj Kunsthalle, Copenhagen and Kunstraum Bethanien, Berlin.

With the support of The Finnish Institute in London and Frame Visual Art Finland.

Paul Purgas has a multi-disciplinary approach that brings together elements of sound and composition, architecture, industrial design and software programming. Originally trained as an architect and graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2004, he has since been based in the curatorial department at Arnolfini, Bristol and curated contemporary art and performance projects for Tate Britain, De La Warr Pavillion, Spike Island and Frieze Art Fair.  Alongside this he is also the co-founder of Emptyset with James Ginzburg, a project that operates as a meeting point for sound, architecture and performance considering full frequency audio, psychoacoustics and the legacy of Structural/Materialist production. Emptyset have produced installations for Tate Britain and the Architecture Foundation in London, and live performances at Bergen Konsthall, CTM/Transmediale, Kunsthalle Zurich and the Wysing music festival in 2012.

Erica Scourti draws on a personal biography to explore the notion of a subject aware of herself as caught within a system of techno-social representations, reflecting on questions of post-authenticity, intimacy and connection in a fully mediated world. Her work in video, performance, online and with text has been shown recently in groups shows and festivals, Transmediale 15, Haus De Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, (2015), End User, Hayward Project Space, London (2014), Soft Machines, IMPAKT Festival, Utrecht, (2014), P/N/19 Foam, a peripatetic project by Mat Jenner at Project/ Number, London, (2014), Snow Crash, Banner Repeater, London, (2014). She has also presented performances and talks at the ICA, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, DRAF and the Southbank Centre.

23 March to 10 May

Our first set of residencies in 2015 start in March when artists Kit Craig, Joey Holder and Takeshi Shiomitsu, alongside Electra’s Irene Revell, will re-locate to Wysing for six weeks.

During the residencies we will have programmed a series of events that takes some of the artists’ ideas as a starting point to further explore the subject of The Multiverse, which is Wysing’s artistic focus across 2015.

For details of events related to the residencies click here.

Kit Craig deals with the problems of how an idea or thought process can translate into an externalised form. The resulting sculptures, drawings and videos investigate this imperfect process of communication emphasising their absurd, out-of-sync and holographic nature. Recent solo exhibitions include: A Room Without Sculptures, Arcade, London, (2014), Shuffle, Parfitt Gallery, Croydon (2013), Nine Men’s Morris, La Galeria Maria Grazia del Prete, Rome, (2011). Recent group exhibitions include: Drawing Biennial, Drawing Room, London (2015/13/11); Ginko Goethe Garden, Arcade, London (2011); With words like smoke, Chelsea Space, London (2010).

Joey Holder mixes elements of biology, nanotechnology and natural history against computer program interfaces, screen savers and measuring devices. Working across trans-media platforms her work operates through an ongoing state of transformation, constantly morphing and inhabiting different realms. Holder was a recent finalist for the Converse/Dazed Emerging Artist Award (2013); included in Vestige: The Future is Here, Design Museum, London (2013) and Multinatural Histories, Harvard Museum of Natural History, Massachusetts, USA (2013). Recent solo exhibitions include HYDROZOAN, The Royal Standard, part of the Liverpool Biennial program (2014) and BioSTAT. at Project Native Informant, London (2015).

Takeshi Shiomitsu questions the ways power and ideology affects our intuitive interactions with the world, particularly a rapidly technologized and networked life through exposure to images. From this source, he creates a slippery aesthetic, opening, leading to and suggesting multiples and contraries. Recent solo/two persons show Spirit Level with Jesse Darling, Andor, London, (2015); WASH, Happy Times, Milcote House, London (2014); Every line ever spoken (with Sandra Vaka Olsen), 68, Copenhagen (2014) and You Are Beautiful, LimaZulu, London (2013). Recent group exhibitions include June Snow, Evelyn Yard, London (2014); Unified Fabric, Arcadia Missa, London (2013); and Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin/Madrid, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2012). Shiomitsu has contributed to publications Palace of Peace & Reconciliation (2014) and (networked) Every Whisper Is a Crash On My Ears (2013), both published by A_M.

Electra curates, commissions and produces projects by artists working across sound, moving image, performance and the visual arts. Through close dialogue with a range of venues and collaborators, Electra presents projects across the UK and internationally. At the heart of their practice is a process-based relationship between artist, curator and audiences, which seeks to give the projects space to find their own rhythm, public outputs, and discourse.   Electra's core aim is to foster a dialogue between a range of disciplines of contemporary artistic practice, to provide a platform for debate and engaged, dynamic investigations of urgent social, political and cultural questions. Projects include: Someone Else Can Clean Up This Mess (Flat Time House, 2014-15); Her Noise: Feminisms and the Sonic (Tate Modern, 2012); Sound Escapes (Space 2009); The Wire 25 (2007).

5 November - 14 December 2014

Five artists have been invited to be in-residence at Wysing for six weeks during late autumn/early winter 2014. They are:

Olivier Castel, Julia Crabtree & William Evans, Jesse Darling and Alice Theobald.

All the artists will be making new work which will be presented at Wysing in 2015. In the meantime, keep up to date with events related to the residencies via Facebook, Twitter and our e-bulletin.

Olivier Castel has presented work under thirty different identities since 2001, each of which is associated with a different body of work, whilst also sporadically appearing under his own name. He uses ephemeral or temporal forms – primarily projection, light, surface, text and audio – as a set of propositions to explore the process by which an idea, space, image, or thought is made visible. Recent solo exhibitions include Fountain, Ibid, London, 2014, a staging of the unrealised feature film Le Moine, 1970, by Luis Buñuel; The Back of an Image, Rowing, London, 2013, a room with a computer-controlled moving light programmed to reproduce Castel’s handwriting, tracing text across the walls from poems, texts and doodles, intermittently repeating the phrase, ‘a film without images’; and Imaginary lives/Eight hearts, Hayward Gallery, London, 2012.

Julia Crabtree and William Evans have worked together for the last nine years in what they describe as an ‘experiment in shared subjectivity’. Their work is rooted in making sculpture as art work, prop, or tool within a larger process, to create installation, video, print and performance. Recent work explores what happens to objects and images when they are put through a digital blender – via scanning, CGI, virtual staging and simulation – to be expunged out into the world in another format. Their work Antonio Bay, 2014 – which began by virtually modelling the galleries and filling them with smoke – is currently on display at South London Gallery, the culmination of their Nina Stewart Residency. Other solo exhibitions include Hyper Bole, Legion TV, London, 2014 and Jetty, James Taylor Gallery, London, 2009.

Jesse Darling – JD - works in sculpture, installation, text and "dasein by design", thinking about networked subjectivity and the way that structures - architectural, [bio]political, philosophical - manifest in physical and social bodies. Recent solo exhibitions include presenting a series of new sculptures in How Can It Hurt You When It Looks So Good with Arcadia_Missa at START Art Fair, London, 2014 and Not Long Now at LimaZulu, London, 2014. Recent group exhibitions include Ends Again at Supplement Gallery, London, 2014 and Snow Crash at Banner Repeater, 2014. JD is represented by Arcadia_Missa, London.

Alice Theobald produces live performance, video and installation, exploring the tension between authenticity and spectacle, form and feeling, and cliché and collective empathy, using moving image, text, spoken word, dance and music. Borrowing from the vocabulary of film, television, literature and pop music, Theobald's work circles questions of representation and manipulation – in particular with constructs of the self within private and public space, of the emotions, of language and human relations. Selected performances, exhibitions and screenings include: I’ve said yes now, that’s it., The Chisenhale Gallery Interim, 2014 and Outpost, Norwich, 2014; Foam, P/N Gallery, 2014, AFTER/HOURS/DROP/BOX, Spike Island, Bristol, 2014, Modern Art Oxford, Oxford, 2013; Young London, V22, London, 2013; and They Keep Putting Words In My Mouth! An Operetta of Sorts, Pilar Corrias, London, 2013.

9 June - 15 August

Futurecamp is a ten week residency and intrinsic events programme across the summer of 2014. Artists who will be in-residence are Bonnie Camplin (UK), David Raymond Conroy (UK), Patrick Goddard (UK), Daniel Keller (USA), Rachel Maclean (UK), Shana Moulton (USA), Ahmet Öğüt (TR/NL), Rachel Reupke (UK), James Richards (UK) and Tracey Rose (ZA).

For Futurecamp the artists will live and work from Wysing’s 11 acre rural site. Two artists, David Raymond Conroy and James Richards, will be in-residence for the entire ten weeks, with the other eight artists joining them for shorter periods and to contribute to a series of public events that explore different aspects of the future. For these events, individuals from outside the arts including academics, philosophers and activists will also make contributions.

Following an Open Call for contributions earlier this year, neuroscientist Luca Lemi and the German arts collective d3signbur3au, and artists Yuri Pattison, Soheila Sohkanvari, Ben Vickers and Jessica Wiesner will also contribute to the events.

The events take place every other Saturday throughout Futurecamp. Full details on our events page, here:

14 June, 12–6pm - The Way We Act Now: Psychology and Behaviour in the Digital Age

28 June, 12–6pm - Private vs Public: Activism, Economics and Politics Today

12 July, 12–6pm - The Way We Live Now: Environmental and Social Consequences

26 July, 12–6pm - Alternative Methods: Art and Education

9 August, 12 – 6pm - A Post-Gender World

Bonnie Camplin broadly describes her work as ‘The Invented Life’, which has included eight years as a para-theatrical producer, director, dancer and performer of experimental club nights in Soho London as well as work across the disciplines of drawing, film and video, performance, music and writing. She has shown in London and internationally and her work has included collaborations with artists Enrico David, Mark Leckey, Lucy McKenzie and Paulina Olowska. She is currently a Lecturer in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College and was Guest Professor of the Film-Class at Städelschule Frankfurt from 2008 to 2010. Recent projects include a workshop on the metaphysics of surveillance at Hayward Gallery London during Wide Open School (2012) and the solo show No More Car Sick at Cabinet London. She will be presenting new work at the South London Gallery and Liverpool Biennial this year.

David Raymond Conroy's compositions investigate the performance and construction of subjectivity within shared social space. Utilising commercial display strategies and theatrical staging techniques, Conroy assembles products, texts, images and performances that position the idea of faithfulness or fidelity in relation to desire. Central to Conroy’s work is this circular overlapping of production and consumption – how authenticity meets artifice in the formation of the self. Conroy presented the solo project, PPE, or It is spring and I am blind at Modern Art Oxford in 2013, other projects include a solo presentation L’homme qui voulait savoir at GP & N Vallois, Paris, a staged reading Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, (with Andy Holden), ICA, London and Arnolfini and the exhibition A Plea for Tenderness, Seventeen Gallery, London. He lives and works in London.

Patrick Goddard is an artist and writer working in East London, graduating from a Masters at Goldsmiths in 2011. Recent works have taken the form of videos, books, performances and sculpture, all with an emphasis on observational anecdotes or research led articles, often utilising visual games or puns to offset sociological observances. Without becoming politically illustrative, many works explore socio-politically loaded issues from conceptions of evil to class politics, sociology to anarchy, the uncanny to the absurd. Recent and forthcoming shows include Revolver II, Matt’s Gallery, Solo Show, London, (2014); Operation Paperclip, Comic launch and performance at Matt’s Gallery, London, (2014); Open Film, Outpost Gallery, Norwich, (2013); Vanguard, the Jewish Museum, Salonica, (2013); Apocalipstick performance as part of the Art Licks Weekend, (2013); and Dear Serge, The De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill (2013).

Daniel Keller's wide-ranging output engages with issues at the intersection of economics, technology, culture and collaboration. His current focus of research is on notions of progress, technological disruption and the role of the post-studio 'prosumer imagineer' artist in the global networked economy. As Aids-3D, he has exhibited throughout Europe and the United States since 2006. In 2012 he became Director of Absolute Vitality Inc, a Wyoming based corporation that is used as a "special purpose vehicle", a corporate entity set up to manage ownership of itself and its parts. Along with Simon Denny, he is co-organizer of TEDxVaduz which was held at the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein in December 2013. Recent solo exhibtions include eVita, Casa Maauad, Mexico City (2014); 63rd-77th steps, Bari, Italy (2014); Lazy Ocean Drift, New Galerie, Paris (2013); abc, art berlin contemporary, with Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin (2013). He lives and works in Berlin.

Rachel Maclean makes videos that combine a multitude of aesthetic and performative tropes from pop videos, YouTube performances and commercials to nursery rhymes, creating day-glo, hyper-real compositions, in which she performs all the characters herself. These works address contemporary identity and consumption in work that could only have been made in today’s ‘post-Internet’ world. Maclean graduated from BA Drawing and Painting at Edinburgh College of Art in 2009 which included a student exchange, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Recent and upcoming solo-exhibitions include The Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow; Glasgow Film Festival, (2014); I HEART SCOTLAND, as part of the Edinburgh Art Festival and Germs, for Channel 4 Random Acts (2013). Maclean was recently shortlisted for The Jarman Award and is the recipient of the Margaret Tait Award 2013. Rachel Maclean lives and works in Glasgow.

Shana Moulton grew up near Yosemite, California, earned her BA from University of California, Berkeley in Art and Anthropology and her MFA from Carnegie Mellon University. Over the past ten years she has been developing her ongoing video/performance series Whispering Pines, in which she plays the role of ‘Cynthia’, a middle age woman, who is both a fictional figure and the artist's alter ego. Moulton has had solo exhibitions or performances at The New Museum, SFMOMA, MoMA P.S.1, Performa 2009, The Kitchen, Electronic Arts Intermix, Art in General, The Andy Warhol Museum, The Palais De Tokyo in Paris, The Migros Museum in Zurich and the Times Museum in Guangzhou. She is a featured artist at Electronic Arts Intermix and Art21 and teaches art at The Kunstakademie Münster. Shana Moulton lives and works in New York and Munich.

Ahmet Öğüt is a socio-cultural initiator, mediator, artist, negotiator and lecturer, whose work addresses social situations, communications, and recently, alternative forms of educational and institutional systems. Working across a variety of media, Öğüt's recent institutional solo exhibitions include Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto (2014), Stacion – Center for Contemporary Art Prishtina (2013), Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Stuttgart (2012) and SALT Beyoglu, Istanbul (2011). He has taught at the Dutch Art Institute, Netherlands (2012), Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, Finland (2011 and 2013), Yildiz Teknik University, Turkey (2004-2006), amongst others. Ögüt was awarded with the Visible Award for The Silent University (2013) and he co-represented Turkey at the 53rd Venice Biennale together with Banu Cennetoğlu (2009). Ahmet Öğüt lives and works in Istanbul.

Rachel Reupke works primarily with the moving image. Recent videos deal with the idea of worry – worry about health, money, social status, relationships etc. She is interested in the exploitation of worry for marketing purposes and how it is represented within the context of commercial image production. She is also interested in the difference between an explicit illustration of a worry and the counterpart depiction of a fantasy life without that worry. Recent screenings include Assembly: A Survey of Recent Artists’ Film and Video in Britain 2008–2013 at Tate Britain (2014); Getting In at South London Gallery and Flatness: Cinema after the Internet at Oberhausen Film Festival (2013). She was awarded a FLAMIN production award from Film London in 2011 and the resulting film Wine & Spirits was shown at Cell Project Space, London in 2013. She is currently working on a new performance commission for Whitstable Biennale. Rachel Reupke lives and works in London.

James Richards works primarily between moving image, sound and sculpture, often merging these forms within individual works to interrogate the experience of what it is to view and be viewed. He creates collages using images and sound, taken from a range of sources – such as viral web video footage, mainstream cinema, experimental music and intimate video portraits of friends – to address the cultural and emotional resonance of moving image. Richards was a 2012 recipient of the Derek Jarman award and participated in the LUX Associate Artists Programme in 2008. Recent solo exhibitions include The Screens, RODEO, Istanbul (2013); James Richards at CCA Kitakyushu, Japan (2012); and Not Blacking Out, Just Turning the Lights Off at Chisenhale Gallery, London (2011) and Tate Britain (2010). He lives and works in Berlin and London.

Tracey Rose works with performance, film and photography to make work that addresses the complexity of gender, sexuality and racial identities, usually performing as multiple characters, allowing her to play with the ambiguity that this creates. Rose has had solo presentations in South Africa, as well as in Europe and the Americas, has been featured in major international events such as the Venice Biennale in 2001 and group exhibitions such Africa Remix (2005), Hayward Gallery, London. Tracey Rose: Waiting for God, the artist’s mid-career retrospective, was held at the Johannesburg Art Gallery (2011) and Bildmuseet, Umeå University, Sweden, (2012). In 2006, she was named one of the 50 greatest cultural figures to emerge from Africa by The Independent newspaper in London, UK. She currently has a solo exhibition at the Reina Sofía Museum, Madrid including a newly commissioned film made in the city and around the museum. Tracey Rose lives and works in Durban, South Africa.

The Live/Work studio at Wysing is a combined home and studio space where artists, curators, writer and musicians come for longer periods of time to research new work. 

During 2013 the Live/Work studio was occupied by artist Gustav Metzger, in 2012 by Jamie Shovlin and during 2014 curator and writer Kathy Noble worked from the studio.

During the ten months Kathy spent living and working at Wysing, she contributed to our 25th birthday programme including curating the group exhibition Hey, I'm Mr Poetic, full details here, and co-curating the ambitious residency and events programme Futurecamp, details here.

Kathy was also involved in organising an Artists' Masterclass retreat with Dora Garcia, details here, and in supporting our young artists' programme, Circuit, working with them on the project I am the warrior, details here.

Kathy also supported a number of artists with studio visits and advice on writing funding applications, and has contributed to a publication to mark Wysing's 25th birthday, to be launched in early 2015.

Kathy Noble is a curator and writer and was previously Head of Exhibitions at Nottingham Contemporary, and prior to that, Curator (Interdisciplinary Projects) at Tate Modern. There she co-curated The Tanks opening programme, working with artists including Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, Sung Hwan Kim, Boris Charmatz, Ei Arakawa and Tania Bruguera. She also co-curated the performance programme Tate Modern Live, presenting projects with artists including Trisha Brown, Michael Clark, Keren Cytter, Katerina Seda and Robert Morris, and the online programme Performance Room with Pablo Bronstein, Jerome Bel, Emily Roysdon and Joan Jonas. She writes widely for magazines such as Afterall, Frieze  and Art Monthly and recent catalogue essays include Tania Bruguera, Geoffrey Farmer and Emma Hart.

We are collaborating with the Crucible network at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory on a new programme, Defining Pi.

We are collaborating with the Crucible network at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory on a new programme, Defining Pi.

The artists selected for the programme, which runs from August to October, are Richard Healy, Kate Owens, Rob Smith, Chooc Ly Tan and Dan Tombs.

All the artists are embarking on learning new skills in computer programming in order to enable them to make new work with the Raspberry Pi.

The Raspberry Pi was developed in Cambridge as a charitable, open source venture aimed at giving young people affordable equipment in which to develop computer programming skills. It has become a global phenomenon. At just £25 per computer, the Raspberry Pi is providing a new generation of low cost and extremely portable equipment and alongside the computer itself a camera and sonic module have been developed.

The artists are working remotely with the support of Dr. Sam Aaron, Technical Manager and Research Associate at the Raspberry Pi Foundation and University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory. All works and coding developed will be widely disseminated in order to share the experiences of the artists.

This exciting programme is being delivered in partnership with the Raspberry Pi Foundation and with funding from Arts Council England.

Dr Sam Aaron will be running a Raspberry Pi workshop during our Space-Time festival on 31 August as well as performing live coding with his band Meta-eX.

21 September - 10 November
Artists-in-residence: James Beckett, Cécile B. Evans, Michael Dean, Seb Patane
Maker-in-residence: Rupert Norfolk

Convention T, refers to logician, mathematician and philosopher Alfred Tarski (1901-1983) who applied logic to sentence structure in order to make the truth visible through language. Tarski created a structure, a meta-language, that could be applied to real, everyday, language in order to generate true statements, known as T sentences - “A and B” is true if and only if A is true and B is true translates as Snow is white if and only if snow is white.

An events programme accompanies the residencies. For details please click here.

Click on the artists' images to see a slide show of examples of their work.

James Beckett adapts found objects and items from museum storage to create sculptural arrangements and installations. His work questions the status of artefacts and the nature of collections, becoming an exploration of diverse historical themes, such as those of industrial heritage or the origins of ethnicities. Beckett was born in Zimbabwe and lives and works in Amsterdam.  He has had solo exhibitions internationally, including Germany, The Netherlands, Italy, Belgium and South Africa, and has been in group exhibitions at venues such as the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Wattis, San Francisco, Dak’art - African Biennale, Dakar, GAM, Turin and The Kitchen NYC.

Cécile B. Evans is a Belgian-American artist who lives and works in Berlin.  Her work focuses on how contemporary society values emotion: its production, hierarchy and representation within culture.  She often sources material from science, film or the internet, and is interested in building structures with no hierarchy.  She is the 2012 recipient of the Emdash Award, which resulted in a commissioned work for the Frieze Art Fair in London. Recent exhibitions have included a solo performance at Palais de Tokyo Contemporary Art Museum, Paris, How to Eclipse the Light at Wilkinson Gallery, London, Spencer Brownstone Gallery, New York and Bergen Art Museum, Norway. She has a degree from New York University’s BFA Theatre program.

Interview with Cécile B. Evans on her Convention T residency, by Beth Bramich for This is Tomorrow here.

Michael Dean was born in Newcastle upon Tyne. Writing and the delivery of this writing into states of typographical physicality centre Dean's research into the political properties of language, pertaining to authorship and autonomy. Taking the form of writing, reading, drawing, photography, video, sculpture, installation and publication, solo exhibitions include Cubitt, London, The Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, Supportico Lopez, Berlin, Herald St, London; Nomas Foundation, Rome and Kunstverein Freiburg, Germany.

Seb Patane was born in Italy and lives and works in London.  His work includes drawings and adapted found imagery and objects, as well as sound, video and performance.   He is interested in ideas of history, particularly the visual outputs of political endeavours and ideas of protest.  A recent focus has been on collective gatherings. He has had solo exhibitions at China Art Objects, Los Angeles, La Kunsthalle Mulhouse, Mulhouse, Maureen Paley, London, Art Statements at Art Basel, and Art Now, Tate Britain, London. Group exhibitions include No New Thing Under The Sun, Royal Academy of Art, London, Compass in Hand: Selections from the Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawing Collection, Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Beck’s Futures, ICA London and touring.

Rupert Norfolk utilises a wide range of processes, such as drawing, tapestry weaving, stone carving, airbrushing, casting and computer aided technologies. His work involves investigations into the perceptual and conceptual possibilities of concrete and depicted things. He lives and works in London and has exhibited at venues including: Museo di Santa Giula, Brescia, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, CAPC Musée d'art Contemporain, Bordeaux, Eastside Projects, Birmingham, The Saatchi Gallery, London, The Drawing Room, London, Transmission Gallery, Glasgow, Kunstwerke, Berlin, and PS1, New York.

Interview with Rupert Norfolk on his Convention T residency, by Beth Bramich for This is Tomorrow here.

In August, visual artist Keren Cytter will relocate from New York to Wysing for a residency with musicians Keira Fox and Charlie Feinstein of Maria & the Mirrors and David Aird of Vindicatrix. This exciting new collaboration will lead to the production of a new multimedia performance work, Vociferous, including new video and live music, which will be premiered at Wysing’s annual festival Space-Time on the 31st August, and later performed in an expanded version at the ICA London.

As part of her commission Keren Cytter put out a call for found mobile phone footage which will form the main body of the new video work - including weddings, boats, people, holidays, beaches, parties, drinks, families, personal stuff, professional leftovers, anything.

The final work, Vociferous, will depict a fragmented narrative progressively shattered by shifts from video to scripted performance and live music.Over the course of the piece, video constructed from found footage will increasingly overlap with the melodramatic psychedelic drone of Aird and raucous drum driven industrial dancehall of Fox and Feinstein performing live. The viewer’s perspective will shift from witness to the text based performance and video, to the audience of a live concert and member of the performance itself.

The work will be shown for the first time in our annual art and music festival Space-Time: Convention T, Saturday 31 August. Full festival programme here.  

Vociferous is realised in partnership with London’s ICA and is supported by PRS for Music Foundation and The Elephant Trust.

Read Adrian Searle's review of the work at the ICA here.

Keren Cytter (born 1977) creates films; video installations; performance; and drawings that represent social realities through experimental modes of storytelling. Characterised by a non-linear, cyclical logic Cytter’s films consist of multiple layers of images; conversation; monologue, and narration systematically composed to undermine linguistic conventions and traditional interpretation schemata. Recalling amateur home movies and video diaries, these montages of impressions, memories, and imaginings are poetic and self-referential in composition. The artist creates intensified scenes drawn from everyday life in which the overwhelmingly artificial nature of the situations portrayed is echoed by the very means of their production.

Major solo exhibitions of Cytter's work include Avalanche, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2011); Project Series: Keren Cytter, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2010); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2010); X Initiative, New York (2009); CCA Center for Contemporary Art, Kitakyushu (2009); Centro Huarte de Arte Contemporáneo, Huarte (2008); Lüttgenmeijer, Berlin (2008); Stuk Kunstcentrum, Leuven (2007); MUMOK, Vienna (2007).

Recent group exhibitions include On Apology, CCA Wattis, San Francisco (2012); Whistable Biennale (2012); FAX, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City (2012); The Plot, Power Plant, Toronto (2011); Expanded Cinema, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow (2011); Fare Mondi: 53rd International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia (2009); The Generational: Younger than Jesus, New Museum, New York (2009); Television Delivers People, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2008); Manifesta 7, Trentino (2008); and Yokohama Triennial, Yokahama (2008).

Cytter is also the author of three novels: The Man Who Climbed Up the Stairs of Life and Found Out They Were Cinema Seats (Lukas and Sternberg, New York – Berlin, 2005); The seven most exciting hours of Mr. Trier’s life in twenty-four chapters (Witte de With and Sternberg, Rotterdam-Berlin, 2008), and The Amazing True Story of Moshe Klinberg – A Media Star (onestar, Paris, 2009).

From July, artist Gustav Metzger will re-locate his home and studio to Wysing to develop a new series of works in our Live/Work studio. The Live/Work studio is a space where artists come for longer periods of time to research new work and during 2012 Jamie Shovlin occupied the studio.

Gustav Metzger (born 1926) has close connections to the Eastern region having studied at Cambridge School of Art, lived for a time in King's Lynn and was selector of Norwich's EastInternational in 2005. Metzger is moving his home and studio to Wysing to develop new works and be in-residence during our Convention T residencies, where we will be exploring hidden systems and structures.

Metzger is a well known artist, political activist and influential thinker. His experiences as a child of Jewish origin during WWII Germany have deeply affected his work throughout his life. He came to the UK as part of the Refugee Children Movement in 1939  and in 1960s London  developed the concept of Auto-Destructive Art. Metzger continues to exhibit internationally, with a recent solo exhibition at London's Serpentine Gallery in 2009.

Over recent years Gustav has been working with artists London Fieldworks on NULL OBJECT; where a sculptural representation of his brain whilst he was 'thinking about nothing', was carved by a robot following instructions from a computer of EEG readings of his brainwaves. This extraordinary work will be exhibited in Cambidge in the spring 2014.

Read an interview between Gustav Metzger and curator and writer Mark Godfrey in Freize Magazine, issue 108, from 2007, here.

Spring Residencies: 11 March - 6 May
Artists in Residence: Anna Barham, David Osbaldeston, Charlotte Prodger and Florian Roithmayr

Convention T, refers to logician, mathematician and philosopher Alfred Tarski (1901-1983) who applied logic to sentence structure in order to make the truth visible through language. Tarski created a structure, a meta-language, that could be applied to real, everyday, language in order to generate true statements, known as T sentences - “A and B” is true if and only if A is true and B is true translates as Snow is white if and only if snow is white.

An events programme accompanies the residencies, info here.
Click on the images to see more work by each artist.

Anna Barham studied maths and philosophy at Cambridge University before attending the Slade School of Fine Art, London.  She is interested in how meaning is constructed through language and the relationship (or not) of that to ‘truth’, and also in the unruly side of language that takes on a life of its own.  She is keen to use her residency to structure and edit a new video work first developed during a public research project at Site Gallery, Sheffield, which considers the alphabet as a potentially endless linguistic system.   Barham has presented solo projects for Art on the Underground, with Arcade at Frieze Art Fair 2012, and at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, and has taken part in group exhibitions at venues including The Drawing Room, Matt’s Gallery, Flat Time House (all London), Art Exchange, Colchester, Studio International, Leipzig and FRAC Lorraine, Metz.

David Osbaldeston makes collage, drawing, re-drawing, photography, design, and printed matter, and is interested in using his residency to explore how linguistics and avant-garde language might affect our understanding of fictional realities, narrative, and the unfolding of time.  He is also interested in how information systems and diagrams provide a basis for alternative readings. Osbaldeston is represented by Matt’s Gallery, London and is currently resident at the ACME Firestation, London.  He has taken part in exhibitions at venues nationally and internationally including The Modern Institute and CCA, Glasgow, Focal Point, Southend, Rijksakademie, Amsterdam, ICA, London and EAST International, Norwich.

For further information please click here.

Matt's Gallery

Charlotte Prodger works with16mm film, video, writing and performance. She uses the meeting of language and technology to generate cross-associations and slippages, inviting new routes of interpretation. Source material includes YouTube videos, personal anecdotes and the legacy of structural film and queer subjectivity, which she uses to explore contradictions that arise between form and content. Prodger has had solo exhibitions at Studio Voltaire, London and CCA, Glasgow, and taken part in group projects including Frozen Lakes, Artists Space, New York and Cage Rattling commissioned by Electra and The Wire London for the John Cage Centenary at King's Place. She is the recipient of awards from Artangel and Creative Scotland, and has taken part in residencies at CALQ, Montreal and Cove Park, Rosneath.

Read Nicole Yip's article 'In Focus: Charlotte Prodger', published in Frieze March 2013,  here.

Read Charlotte Prodger's interview with Beth Bramich for This is Tomorrow, about her Convention T residency, here.

Florian Roithmayr was born in Germany and lives and works in London.  His work involves the presentation of hand-crafted, sculpted and cast homages to the production of objects, ranging from the wall tiles in a German subway station to the cave paintings of prehistoric man. He often refers to patterns of withdrawal, disinterest or internal retreat. Roithmayr initially trained in Germany as a set designer before studying Fine Art at Slade School of Fine Art, London, the School the Art Institute, Chicago and MA Fine Art at Goldsmiths College. He has had solo exhibitions at MOT International, London, Galerie Neue Alte Brücke, Frankfurt, Ateneum Finnish National Art Museum and Taidehalli Art Centre, Helsinki, Finland.  Group exhibitions have included Solid on our Source Planet, Wysing Arts Centre and Fifteen, S1 Artspace, Sheffield.

Interview with Florian Roithmayr and Beth Bramich, on his Convention T residency,  for This is Tomorrow, here.

Jamie Shovlin studied at the Royal College of Art. Solo exhibitions include ‘Various Arrangements’ at Haunch of Venison, London (2012), ‘Thy Will Be Done’ at Tullie House, Carlisle (2011), ‘Hiker Meat’ at MACRO, Rome (2010) and ‘In Search of Perfect Harmony’ at Tate Britain, London (2006).

Jamie Shovlin is interested in the tension between truth and fiction, reality and invention, history and memory. His projects are long-term engagements with painstaking research applied to working practices specific to each particular project and its focus. Artificial distancing mechanisms are employed within work that seeks to confound and subjugate the role of author, originator and practitioner. These often take the form of literary or filmic traditions including unreliable narration, alternate realities, multiple accounts of the same event, and meta-commentary. His work attempts to merge inherently flawed systems, pseudo-scientific exactitude and doubtful philosophical propositions with the seemingly objective experience of the archive.

Following his period of time in Wysing's Live/Work studio Jamie decided to stay at Wysing long-term and is now working as one of our studio artists.

Click on the image to see more work.

Artists in residence and public events
4 November – 31 December 2012

The Forest is the third in Wysing’s series of residencies for 2012, preceded by The Cosmos (April/May) and The Mirror (July/August). Artists have been invited, through a selection process, to come to Wysing to make new work in response to these themes.

For six weeks from 4 November, artists Jonathan Baldock, Edwin Burdis, Emma Hart and Jess Flood-Paddock, and musician Luke Abbott, are in residence at Wysing’s rural site near Cambridge, developing  new art works that explore the future, nature and transformation in response to the metaphor of The Forest.

During each residency distinguished experts, amateur hobbyists and members of the public will contribute to an ongoing talks and events programme.  The three themes, or environments, have emerged from ongoing artistic enquiry at Wysing. The Cosmos, the initial starting points of which were the past, origins and knowledge, The Mirror: the present, reflection and commentary and The Forest: the future and transformation through nature are influenced by literary references to other worlds and the merging of fact and fiction, in particular the writings of JG Ballard, Jorge Luis Borges, Michel Foucault, WG Sebald and Kurt Vonnegut.

Reinforcing the literary influences on the residencies, Escalator artist-in-residence Patrick Coyle is documenting the year long programme of residencies through creative writing via his ongoing blog

The Forest events programme includes contributions from scientists, writers and musicians, on themes including the wild wood, infertility, and fashion forecasting. For more information about the programme please click here.

Work created by artists during the residency programme, which is funded by Arts Council England and Paul Hamlyn Foundation, is shown at Wysing Arts Centre before being seen by audiences at venues across the UK and beyond.

4 November — 16 December 2012

Jonathan Baldock has a BA from Winchester School of Arts and MA in painting from the Royal College of Art, London (2007). Jonathan Baldock makes theatrical and darkly humorous objects, installations and paintings, which are often influenced by traditions of folklore, craft and ritual. He has recently had solo exhibitions The Blue Epoch, Colloredo-Mansfeldský Palác, AMoYA, Prague (Czech) (2012), Pierrot, PeregrineProgram, Chicago (USA) (2011), The Fool’s Flipside, Cell Projects, London (UK) (2010). His works been included in group exhibitions such as Condensation, Danielle Arnaud Contemporary, London (2011) and Jonathan Baldock / Karla Black / Morag Keil / Jonanthan Monk, MALLORCA Landings (2011).  He has been awarded with an Arts Council England Grant, Sichuan Fine Art Institute, Chongqing (China) (2011) and recently he has been awarded with Abbey Fellowship, British School in Rome (Italy) (2013).

Edwin Burdis’s practice explores a unique fusion between art, music and sub-cultural references for which he has in the past taken on various artistic personas. Recent performances and solo exhibitions include MegaDairyPigFarm, Max Wigram Gallery, London, P.E.A.R., Handlung events, the Hackney Bureau, London, LongMeg, Milton Keynes Gallery, Milton Keynes (2012),  Bruderkriegsoundsystem, ICA, London,  Home Service, Hayward Gallery Project Space, London, (2011), LongMeg, Be Glad For The Song Has No End, Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge, (2010), No Soul for Sale, Tate Modern, London (2010), LongMeg, Golden Zeiten, Haus De Kunst, Munich, Germany, (2010), LongMeg International Project Space, Bourneville, Birmingham, (2010).

Emma Hart has presented solo exhibitions and performances at galleries including Cell Project Space, Stanley Picker Gallery and Modern Art Oxford. Her practice is a course of imaginative action for domestic technology, manifesting in videos, sculptures and performances. She is currently researching for her PhD at Kingston University. In 2011 Hart presented TO DO, a critically acclaimed solo show at Matt’s Gallery, where she is represented. In 2012 her first in the series of Monuments to the Unsaved was exhibited when she was nominated for the Jerwood Foundation / Film and Video Umbrella awards. Hart's forthcoming projects include a new commission at the Whitstable Biennale 2012 and a solo presentation at Camden Arts Centre, London, in 2013.

Jess Flood-Paddock has a BA from the Slade School of Fine Art and an MA from The Royal College of Art.  Her work is a multi-disciplined sculptural practice that attempts to retain a sense of impermanence and a relationship with history. Recent UK solo exhibitions have included Gangsta’s Paradise at the Hayward Gallery Project Space and Island, A regime, a video commission from Frieze Foundation. Her latest international shows have been Grid System, A Regime, Malta and Recent British Sculpture, Amsterdam, where Jess is represented by Grimm Gallery. She has been awarded funding by the Arts Council, the Henry Moore Foundation, the Elephant Trust, Frieze Foundation and Channel 4.  She has an upcoming solo show in September at Tate Britain in the Art Now series.

Luke Abbott originally studied Fine Art at Norwich University College of the Arts specialising in printmaking and photomedia.  Following graduation he pursued his interest in electronic music completing a MMus in Electroacoustic Music and Sonic Arts at the University of East Anglia.  He came to prominence within the international sonic and electronic music scene in 2010 through his debut album Holkham Drones which received significant media exposure and widespread critical acclaim.  He currently tours extensively throughout world and makes frequent appearances at international music and sonic art festivals.

Patrick Coyle has an MFA in Writing from Goldsmiths College, London (2010). He has recently performed at the launch of CONCRETE POETRY at Hayward’s Concrete Café, London and at Spike Island, Bristol. He was the inaugural writer-in-residence for Akerman Daly in 2011.

His blog, www.wysingsongs.tumblr.com documents the 2012 residencies at Wysing (The Cosmos, The Mirror and The Forest) and can be read here.

Artists in residence and public events
15 July – 24 August
Annual Open Weekend
14-15 July 10am-6pm

The Mirror is the second in Wysing’s series of residencies for 2012, preceded by The Cosmos (April/May) and followed by The Forest (November/December). Artists have been invited, through a selection process, to come to Wysing to make new work in response to these themes.

For six weeks from 15 July, artists Ed Atkins, Nicolas Deshayes, Philomene Pirecki and Turner Prize 2012 nominee Elizabeth Price are in residence at Wysing’s rural site, developing  new work that explores the contemporary and alternate realities in response to the metaphor of The Mirror. To launch their residencies the artists took part in a public round-table discussion chaired by Jeremy Millar at 2.30pm on Sunday 15 July as part of our annual Open Weekend.

During each residency distinguished experts, amateur hobbyists and members of the public will contribute to an ongoing talks and events programme.  The three themes, or environments, have emerged from ongoing artistic enquiry at Wysing. The Cosmos, the initial starting points of which were the past, origins and knowledge, The Mirror: the present, reflection and commentary and The Forest: the future and transformation through nature are influenced by literary references to other worlds and the merging of fact and fiction, in particular the writings of JG Ballard, Jorge Luis Borges, Michel Foucault, WG Sebald and Kurt Vonnegut.

The Mirror residency launched during Wysing’s annual Open Weekend, which included a glimpse into the studios of Erica Böhr & Lisa Wilkens, Jackie Chettur, Elena Cologni, Bettina Furnee, Rob Smith, Helen Stratford, Caroline Wendling, Simon Woolham and Caroline Wright, who are based on our rural site.  There were also contributions from guest artists, film screenings, family workshops and refreshments by artist-concept cafe Grantchester Ices (Giles Round and Phil Root).

Reinforcing the literary influences on the residencies, Escalator artist-in-residence Patrick Coyle is documenting the year long programme of residencies through creative writing that can be accessed via an ongoing blog

Work created by artists during the residency programme, which is funded by Arts Council England and Paul Hamlyn Foundation, is shown at Wysing Arts Centre before being seen by audiences at venues across the UK and beyond.

15 July — 26 August 2012

Ed Atkins works predominantly in HD video, drawing and writing to explore notions of materiality and corporeality pushing the senses to overload through immersive and thought-provoking work which harnesses the tension between human presence and mechanical process.

Atkins lives and works in London and holds an MA Fine Art from Slade School of Fine Art. He is represented by Cabinet Gallery and his recent work has been shown at the ICA, London, Whitechapel Gallery, London and international venues. Atkins was shortlisted for The Jarman Award in 2011 and has a solo exhibition at London’s Chisenhale gallery opening in Autumn 2012.

Nicolas Deshayes sculptures are preoccupied with surfaces – where they begin, where they end, and what meaning they might carry.  He uses the surface to explore notions of reality, authenticity and desire and the relationship between base materiality and technology.

Deshayes was born in 1983 and lives and works in London.  He complted an MA in Sculpture at The Royal College of Art, London, and his work was shown as part of Wysing Arts Centre’s exhibition The Starry Rubric Set in February/March 2012.  He is represented by Jonathan Viner Gallery and has also exhibited at The Zabludowicz Collection, London, Transmission Gallery, Glasgow and at venues internationally.

Philomene Pirecki’s practice includes painting, photography, drawing, slide projections, sculpture and text.  She uses structures and systems that attempt to organise what are essentially intangible and mutable concepts or situations, for instance ideas relating to perception, time, memory and representation. Many works reference the conditions of their own production as a means to draw attention to the unstable relationship between ideas and their material form.

Pirecki was born in Jersey in 1972 and lives and works in London. She has exhibited internationally including at The Barbican, London, South London Gallery, MOT International, Brussels and Laure Genillard, London. She graduated from an MA in Fine Art (Painting) at the Royal College of Art in 1996.

Elizabeth Price creates immersive video installations incorporating digital moving image, text and music. They draw upon existing archives of film, photography and physical collections of art to invent new, apocalyptic narratives.   Human action is rarely directly featured: instead, the drama is mainly expressed using objects which stand in for humans and are used to present institutional contexts and social histories, as well as aspirations and desires.

Price was born in 1966 and lives and works in London.  She has recently had solo exhibitions at Baltic, Newcastle, and Chisenhale Gallery, London.  She studied at the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford, and completed an MA (Fine Art) at the Royal College of Art, London, (1991).  She is nominated as one of four artists for The Turner Prize, 2012 and is represented by MOT International.

Artists in residence and public events:
1 April – 12 May 2012
Exhibition 12 – 27 May

The Cosmos is the first in Wysing’s series of residencies for 2012, followed by The Mirror (July/August) and The Forest (November/December). Artists have been invited, through a selection process, to come to Wysing to make new work in response to these themes.

Four artists and artist groups, Salvatore Arancio, Flora Parrott, Nilsson Pflugfelderand Stuart Whipps, were in residence for six weeks from 1 April, where developed new work culminating in an exhibition in Wysing’s gallery.

During each residency distinguished experts, amateur hobbyists and members of the public will contribute to an ongoing talks and events programme.  The three themes, or environments, have emerged from ongoing artistic enquiry at Wysing. The Cosmos, the initial starting points of which were the past, origins and knowledge, The Mirror: the present, reflection and commentary and The Forest: the future and transformation through nature are influenced by literary references to other worlds and the merging of fact and fiction, in particular the writings of JG Ballard, Jorge Luis Borges, Michel Foucault, WG Sebald and Kurt Vonnegut.

Reinforcing the literary influences on the residencies, Escalator artist-in-residence Patrick Coyle is documenting the year long programme of residencies through creative writing via his ongoing blog

Work created by artists during the residency programme, which is funded by Arts Council England and Paul Hamlyn Foundation, is shown at Wysing Arts Centre before being seen by audiences at venues across the UK and beyond.

1 April — 12 May 2012

Salvatore Arancio’s artistic signature is photo-etching, but he works across a range of media such as collage, animation and video. Arancio’s main interest lies in the potential of images. Departing from their literal meaning, he creates new juxtapositions that are both beautifully evocative and deeply disquieting. Arancio looks to nature and science for his sources of inspiration, while unsettling any hint of the sublime by re-framing the images and the viewer’s experience. His constructed landscapes contain a sense of both the familiar and the unknown that enhances their symbolic readings and implications.

Arancio has recently presented the following exhibitions: An Arrangement of the Materials Ejected, Spacex, Exeter, UK; To See an Object to See a Light, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Guarene d’Alba, Italy; Shasta, Federica Schiavo Gallery, Roma; Sentinel - PPS//Meetings#4, Palazzo Riso - Museo d’Arte Contemporanea della Sicilia, Palermo, Italy; SI-Sindrome Italiana, Le Magasin - Centre National d’Art contemporain de Grenoble, France and An  Account of the Composition of the Earth’s Crust: Dirt Cones and Lava Bombs, Frame, Frieze Art Fair, London, UK.

Flora Parrott’s work is drawn from a compulsion to explain a state of ‘being’, a state that is always evolving and changing. Her work invariably takes the form of 3-dimensional collage in which instinctively chosen images and objects are arranged in a way that articulates a physical experience. The work is made and displayed in an effort to understand and dissect these experiences; to clarify, examine and ‘pin down’ sensations that otherwise seem chaotic and incomprehensible.

Parrott graduated from the Royal College of Art, Printmaking in 2009. She lives in London and works as a Lecturer on the BA and MA Fine Art Course at Norwich University College of Art. Recent exhibitions include: Interstice, Testbed1, London; Trapezius, The Herbert Gallery and Museum, Coventry; Dipole, a solo show and residency at the Ryedale Folk Museum; Circuit: Five Deductions, a solo show with Tintype, London. Parrott is represented by Tintype, London.

Nilsson Pflugfelder was founded by Magnus Nilsson and Ralf Pflugfelder and is based in London and Berlin. The practice is situated on the intersection of critical spatial design, architecture, art and discourse. Nilsson Pflugfelder have been specialising in projects where spatial constructs overlap, dissect and frictionally flatten several usually distinct programs into one coherent gesture. They have an ongoing obsession with archives and - more specifically - how virtual and physical knowledge can be prevented from entering the realm of the forgotten and instead be turned into something visible, present and productive. In tandem with their physical output, they have written a number of theoretical papers on the archive. Magnus Nilsson is an architect, theorist and writer. Ralf Pflugfelder is an artist who explores the spatial aesthetics of utopias and their narratives across several media including drawing, painting, sculpture, video and sound. 

Magnus Nilsson and/or Ralf Pflugfelder's work has been shown, amongst others, at Performa 11 & 09 Biennials, Kunsthaus Graz, Gwangju Biennale, based in Berlin, Kunstraum Lüneburg, 0047, The Gopher Hole, SKOR, Manifesta 8 Biennial, Program e.V., Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Arnolfini, Lyon Biennial.

Stuart Whipps’ work begins with an historic position or artefact. His practice is an examination of issues associated with shared bodies of knowledge. Predominantly using photography and video alongside remade or visually reconfigured materials Whipps questions the role of documentation. His work explores the shifting nature of cultural values and context coupled with a questioning of the importance, veracity or significance of historical documents over time. Recent works have utilised found negatives from redundant photographic labs, the online archive of Margaret Thatcher’s Speeches, Interviews and Statements, The National Archives at Kew, an online archive of vintage ‘adult publications’, Microfilm collections, and the photographic collection of the British Motor Heritage Museum amongst other diverse sources.

Whipps lives and works in Birmingham. Recent solo exhibitions include: Why Contribute to the Spread of Ugliness? Ikon Gallery, Birmingham; New  Wooabbeleri, Focal Point Gallery, Southend on Sea; The Scenery is Very Wonderful. The  Weather is Good, Oriel Davies Gallery, Newtown, Wales and Ming Jue, New Art Gallery Walsall. He has presented work in the following group shows: Community Without Propinquity, MK Gallery, Milton Keynes; Slimvolume, Hayward touring exhibition and Narrative Show, Eastside Projects, Birmingham.

The Department of Overlooked Histories was the final of three Departments within the Institute. For six weeks, artists An Endless Supply, Ruth Beale, Karin Kihlberg & Reuben Henry and Emma Smith worked in residence at Wysing.

Artists in residence and public events 29 September - 12 November 2011
Gallery presentation 13-27 November

For The Department of Overlooked Histories, artists and artist groups An Endless Supply, Ruth Beale, Karin Kihlberg & Reuben Henry and Emma Smith worked at Wysing for six weeks. They looked at how history is constructed and the ways it is understood, accessed and presented.. A series of public events informed the development of work, which was presented in the gallery at the end of the residency.

It was the third in Institute of Beyond's series of residencies, preceded by The Department of Wrong Answers and The Department of Psychedelic Studies. The artists were also included within the end-of-year exhbition The Starry Rubric Set.

EVENTS PROGRAMME

29 September, 6–8pm An evening of informal presentations by the artists-in-residence with invited artist contributor Marjolijn Dijkman.

8 October, 10–7pm Grizedale Arts lead a day of gathering, preparing and cooking food sourced from Wysing’s site, alongside informal talks on the histories of food production and the virtues of using the land, and concluding with a Harvest Service and Supper.

22 October, 2-5pm
Artist contributor Uriel Orlow will present his performance lecture Aide-Memorie (0.7); a piece which presents salvaged material of a future film and explores the territory between travelogue, slide show, obscure history lesson and immersive soundscape.

3 November, 6-8pm
Marjolijn Dijkman will present her research on how history is represented in the East of England and the role that idealisation plays in our constructed narratives. Dijkman’s contribution to the Department is in partnership with firstsite Associate Curator Jes Fernie.

12 November 2-8PM
The closing event for the Department of Overlooked Histories will includes talks, discussions and events with the artists-in-residence and invited contributors.

The Department of Psychedelic Studies was the second of three Departments within the Institute. For six weeks, artists Mark Essen, Hilary Koob-Sassen and Kate Owens worked in residence at Wysing.

Artists in residence and public events 27 June-12 August 2011
Gallery presentation Pursuing The Turquoise Universal 13-28 August

For The Department of Psychedelic Studies, artists Mark Essen, Hilary Koob-Sassen and Kate Owens worked in residence at Wysing exploring ideas around psychedelia and counter-culture. A series of public events informed the development of work, which was presented in the gallery at the end of the residency in the exhibition Pursuing The Turquoise Universal.

The Department was the second in Institute of Beyond's series of residencies, preceded by The Department of Wrong Answers and followed by The Department of Overlooked Histories.  The Department culminated in our second annual music festival, Past Present Future Space Time.  An exhibition, The Starry Rubric Set, brought together work from all of the Departments at the end of the year.

EVENTS PROGRAMME

2 July, 2-9pm A day-long programme of talks, presentations, discussions and screenings, exploring the influence of psychedelia. With the Department of Psychedelic Studies residency artists, writers and academics Jonathan Harris, William Rowlandson and Doctor Roger Buckley. Plus a film programme devised in collaboration with LUX. Adults: £10, Concessions £5. Food and refreshments will be available. Booking essential.

23 &  24 July, 2-5pm An Open Weekend with over 20 artists opening their studios to explore Wysing’s 11 acre rural site. The weekend also includes the presentation of a new project in Wysing’s gallery devised by curator Paul Pieroni in collaboration with the residency artists; poet, sound and visual artist Lawrence Upton and violist and composer Benedict Taylor. Cream Teas will be served throughout the weekend by Café Abantu and there will be free, family drop-in activities Wysing’s site.

The Department of Wrong Answers was the first of three Departments within the Institute of Beyond. For six weeks, artists Rob Filby, Francesco Pedraglio & Laure Prouvost, Giles Round and Cally Spooner worked in residence at Wysing.

Artists in residence and public events 14 February –1 April 2011
Gallery presentation 1-17 April

For The Department of Wrong Answers, artists Rob Filby, Laure Prouvost & Francesco Pedraglio, Giles Round and Cally Spooner worked in residence at Wysing exploring ideas around the theme.

A series of public events informed the development of work, which was presented in a gallery exhibition at the end of the residency.

The Department was the first in the Institute of Beyond's series of residencies, followed by The Department of Psychedelic Studies and The Department of Overlooked Histories.  An exhibition, The Starry Rubric Set, brought together work from all of the Departments at the end of the year.

EVENTS PROGRAMME

26 February, 2-4pm Jan Verwoert, writer and art critic, leads a discussion on the concept of wrong answers.

9 March, 6-8pm *A discussion, chaired by Dr Wendy Pullan, Senior Lecturer in the History and Philosophy of Architecture at Cambridge University, exploring ideas of space, confinement and borders with artists, Ansuman Biswas and Céline Condorelli. Organised by artist, curator and writer Sonya Dyer.

17 March, 6-8pm A presentation by Dr Philip Barnard, of the Medical Research Council’s Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge. Dr Barnard’s research explores how memory, attention, language, body states and emotion work together in the normal healthy, human mind.

19 March, 2-5pm An afternoon of artists’ talks, workshops and events presented by the Department of Wrong Answers.

Phil Root spent nearly a year in our Live/Work studio, focussing on making a new series of paintings. During his time at Wying he met Giles Round, who was in-residence as part of the Department of Wrong Answers. The two later formed The Grantchester Pottery.

Phil also met Norwich based artist Rob Filby, who was also part of the Department of Overlooked Histories residency, and together developed new work for the two person exhibition Phil Filby and Rob Root.

Phil Root played in the first two iterations of our art and music festival, the second time under the collaboration 666 6, with E Park, who he met during the Escalator Retreat Homework .

666 6 contributed to an evening of live events to launch our group exhibition The Starry Rubric Set.

The Grantchester Pottery continue to make work from our ceramics studio and had their first gallery exhibition at Wysing in 2011, in the group exhibition Slipped.

5 June — 11 September 2010

The focus of Asli Cavusoglu’s work stems from experimental narrative exercises on loss, repetition, replicas and narrative interplay across various art media. In the work In Patagonia after Bruce Chatwin, she re-enacted a journey in South America twenty years after Bruce Chatwin’s, depicted in the blurred reality fiction novel In Patagonia. Her journey can be read as the initiation of a fascinated reader of the book who wants to create her own experience, visiting those places named in the book and using the same means of transportation used by Chatwin, finding the same people Chatwin talked to. Asli Cavusoglu planned to address the improbable by looking into the knowledge potential in Cambridgeshire and incorporate this into a new sculptural work.

Andy Holden's work incorporates monumental outdoor structures, plaster and bronze sculpture, film, painting, recorded music and musical performance. Often showing these diverse media together, his work builds a fragmented yet richly textured collision of ideas, references and forms. In the work The Pyramid Piece shown at Art Now in Tate Britain (early 2010), a gigantic knitted boulder was presented alongside an accompanying film and a selection of small pyramid souvenirs. The Pyramid Piece actsed as a means of representing and reconciling the guilt of an event from the artist’s childhood, where he stole a rock from the Great Pyramid of Cheops, Giza. For Wysing, Holden developed his musical practice by creating a festival of artists’ music, Be Glad for The Song Has No End, which took place at Wysing in September 2010.

Fabiano Marques approaches his work is as if it were a game, building structures which have their own rules of interaction. His playfulness often responds to specific settings, as in Mar Pequeno (2003), a work that takes the name of a tropical setting some 150 kilometres from Sao Paulo, Brazil where many rivers join the South Atlantic. The work documents a seven-hour interaction between the artist and a series of floating wooden structures which, at times, function as a raft. More recently, Marques developed a sculptural aeroplane using the design of the plan for the city of Brasilia, and in testing its ability to fly he will also seek to test the concept of Brazilian modernism and identity. He sought to apply his approach to making utopian projects a reality in his commission for this camp.

Julie Myers makes work in response to place and encounters with people, combining geographic data with aural history, local knowledge, collective and shared experience. She uses film, photography, sound, web and locative technologies to produce projects that range from sophisticated mediascapes and interactive films to hand-drawn maps. Previous work has been commissioned by Arts Council England, The British Film Institute, The British Council, The Institute of Contemporary Art and The National Portrait Gallery, London. Corporate collaborators include Adobe Systems, USA, British Telecom, UK and Philips Multi Media, France.

Emily Rosamond is an installation artist and academic researcher working across drawing, sculpture, writing, performance and video. Her work explores objects as agents of social space, and her research interests include characterisation in contemporary sculpture, affect theory, intersubjectivity, Guattarian ecologies, and speech-acts. For her new commission for Wysing, she openly studied concepts of spacialisations of consciousness found in the work of various thinkers such as Plato and Freud. Rosamond wanted to address these concepts and push the idea of how we circumvent space. She constructed a site specific work based on her concept of the constellation of material instances.

Bedwyr Williams works include stand-up comedy, sculpture and painting, posters and photography. Drawing on his own experiences he approaches the world both satirically and seriously, revealing both his and our own idiosyncrasies and neuroses. Through a broad range of media, a strong sense of surrealistic humour and a sharp critical mind, he explores notions of what it means to be an artist born, living and working regionally. Bedwyr Williams was invited to take part in the Camp because of his interest in researching and exploring new approaches to sculpture, and his interest in taking inspiration from the local environment.

Phil Root spent nearly a year in our Live/Work studio, focusing on making a new series of paintings. During his time at Wysing he met Giles Round, who was in-residence as part of the Department of Wrong Answers. The two later formed The Grantchester Pottery.

Phil also met Norwich based artist Rob Filby, who was also part of the Department of Overlooked Histories residency, and together developed new work for the two person exhibition Phil Filby and Rob Root.

Phil Root played in the first two iterations of our art and music festival, the second time under the collaboration 666 6, with E Park, who he met during the Escalator Retreat Homework .

666 6 contributed to an evening of live events to launch our group exhibition The Starry Rubric Set.

The Grantchester Pottery continue to make work from our ceramics studio and had their first gallery exhibition at Wysing in 2011, in the group exhibition Slipped.

During 2009 we explored the theme of Generosity across the programme. Four artists were in-residence during the early half of the year and made new works in response to the theme: Bik Van Der Pol, Celine Condorelli, Freee, Luca Frei, and Christodoulos Panayiotou.

Bik Van Der Pol
Untitled (Gold), 2009
The work of Bik Van der Pol explores the potential of art to improve situations, add what is missing or highlight what’s hidden. The result of their research into the notion of generosity was Untitled (Gold), a work which looks at the perceived opposite of generosity – greed. The motto depicted in the work is an extract from a poem by the British poet Thomas Hood, which discusses how gold is a material that continuously tests both our generosity and our greed. Untitled (Gold) remained on site as one of Wysing's outdoor sculptures until late 2013.

Celine Condorelli
Life always escapes, 2009
A common designates land on which one has the right “to take or use some portion of that which another man’s soil naturally produces,” which includes collecting firewood or keeping one’s animals for grazing, and is as such one of the only alternative property models left in the UK. Using Rights of Common, Condorelli created a ‘common room’ out of modest wooden waste materials, which housed a collection of postcards, photographs and documents from her research into the Commons. The installation included a wood-buring stove that heated the gallery during the autumn by burning wood gathered from local Commons.

Freee
Revolution Road: Rename the Streets! 2009
Works by the art collective Freee take sides, speak their mind and divide opinion. In this new work, the artists and a group of witnesses from Wysing spent a day in Cambridge performing a ceremony to rename some of the city’s favourite streets after leading radical thinkers of the 18th century. Inspired by E.P. Thompson’s pivotal work The Making of the English Working Class, Freee invited us to recognise how these radical thinkers of the working classes were not victims of history but people passionate about progress. The work also had a presence at Zoo Art Enterprises, London, 16-19 October.

Luca Frei
Untitled (…the Sun is the tongue, the Shadow is the language) 2009
Frei’s approach to his practice is exploratory and questioning. In considering this new commission, Frei determined to explore the meaning of generosity throughout the making of the work. He focused on the role of time within generosity, developing a series of ceramic sculptures with supervising support from Wysing studio artist and ceramicist Bob Race. These playful pieces resembled clock faces but on a deeper level represent the generous exchange of time and experience, deeply crafted into the making of the work.

Christodoulos Panayiotou
Tomorrow is Today, 2009
Christodoulos Panayiotou's new work Tomorrow is Today is a conversation between the artist and his former theatre professor Jean Verdeil on the pedagogic legacy of socially engaged theatre with the practices of contemporary socially engaged art. Two framed works referred to this in the gallery: a poster announced the event together with a photographic print; a performance entitled The end by Panayiotou realised in the baroque theatre Markgräfliches Opernhaus in Bayreuth in Germany. The dialogue in Tomorrow is Today was re-enacted as a conversation, directed by Jonathan Young from Shams Theatre, in a special public event on the Sunday 1 November at 5pm at Wysing.

The new works were brought together in the gallery exhibition Generosity is the New Political which also included work by Libia Castro and Ólafur Ólafsson, Tellervo and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen and Kateřina Šedá.

7 July — 7 September 2009

Polonca Lovsin was invited to respond to the architectural artwork Amphis at Wysing’s Bourn site. Amphis, a communal building made mainly out of wooden recycled materials, was built by Martin Kaltwasser and Folke Kobberling and volunteers in 2008. 

Lovsin trained as a sculptor and architect and her work touches upon ecological and playful alternative thinking. Lovsin’s residency led to a collaboration with choreographer Henrietta Hale, scientist in electronics and sustainable engineering from Cambridge University Department of Engineering Dr. Richard McMahon, Ph.D. student Aeffendi Hashim, assistant choreographer Maria Sanderson and six volunteers dancers Judith, Laura, Lenka, Sheila, Katherine and Peter.

During Lovsin’s first research visit in March 2009, it became clear that she wanted to give life and energy to Amphis. This conceived the idea for Dynamo Door Dance. The project's intention was to test out and suggest alternative energy solutions in Amphis by generating electricity through movement. The nature of the project was interdisciplinary and collaborative and became a test site which allowed openness, playfulness and unusual encounters to happen.

Dr. McMahon advised on how to construct a number of energy-harvesting devices and, with his supervision, pre-existing devices based on the dynamo are were developed. Lovsin looked into camping devices and torches of different types: squeeze torches, string and pull torches, string and pull phone chargers, windup camping lamps, wind up phone chargers and Faraday torches. These pre-existing gadgets became the basis of the energy harvesting devices.

With help from Ph.D. student Aeffendi Hashim, it became possible to transform the devices and install them in Amphis. Electricity was produced by jumping and stepping, and was immediately transformed into light and sound through the devices placed at seven points in the floor, on all doors (except the entrance door) on two columns and two beams running through the space.

Choreographer Henrietta Hale was present throughout the creative process. Hale and Lovsin discussed where to place the devices and how movement would work with them. The playful choreography was based on dancers generating electricity. The use of the devices underlined how the dance created a playful and humorous chain reaction.

The outcome of the collaboration was a performance on 22 August 2009 in Amphis that was reworked as an independent video work by Lovsin screened on YouTube. Click here to read more about the event.

1 March — 31 August 2009

During her residency Helen Stratford used site-specific and audio-based interventions to make visible the practices that produce and maintain public space in the nearby settlement of Cambourne.

Gathered during her residency, which continued until August, these practices included the voices of local residents, teenagers, groundsmen, road sweepers, light scouts, planners, and people working on their allotments. A table in the centre of Wysing’s gallery worked as a meeting point for talking and discovering what Helen uncovered during her residency.

Her research revealed both the heavily maintained, and the overlooked and un-noticed public space in Cambourne, and proposed alternative uses for them. Through her residency Helen drew on the practices of performance, architecture and writing to explore how places and identities are produced and performed through everyday objects and activities.

Communities under Construction was funded by Paul Hamlyn Foundation and Arts Council England East. With thanks to Maurice Gordon (Taylor Wimpey) Peter Wooten, Warren Bourne, Jenny Mckay, Margot Eagle, Maurice Buck, Roger Hume, Stewart (Tilbrooks), Claire Denard and Jackie (ESL), Bob Dean, Karen Bagshaw, Kate Wood, Pam Thornton, Barry (Goodwins sweepers), Pat, Alan and PJ (Brehenys), Laura Parkinson, Michelle Link, Lesley Scobell, Mole Architects, Nick Cheek, Sarah Evans and Polonca Lovsin.

1 March — 30 June 2009

Townley and Bradby’s work functions primarily as a framework through which others can reflect on their surroundings. This reflection is often playful and invites participation.

For their residency, Townley and Bradby spent three months living at Wysing with their children. Often working in collaboration with the children, they created an intimate portrait of the landscape and the communities around Wysing Arts Centre. They developed and tested out a variety of tactics to inhabit open spaces in and around Bourn and Cambourne, as well as making journeys across South Cambridgeshire. One event involved chalking out the swift, complicated and coordinated patterns of car parking outside the village nursery at drop-off time.

In another event Townley and Bradby took a 1.5 metre wide inflatable red ball to the edge of Cambourne. They used the ball to measure and activate fields that were to be covered with houses within the next few years.

Communities under Construction was funded by Paul Hamlyn Foundation and Arts Council England East. With thanks to Little Hands Nursery, Nicole Simpson, Jamie Wilkes, Sally Davies, Richard and Judith Townley, Donald Bradby, Oliver Hein, Crystal Valeting Ltd, Comberton Playgroup, Trademark Collections, Robin & Isabelle, Michelle, Mark and others who helped with the Unplanned Journey, Sarah Evans

1 February — 30 April 2009

After researching Wysing and the surrounding villages the artist group A KASSEN, who are based in Copenhagen, developed a spectacular artistic idea in collaboration with Bourn Airfield and which resulted in the work Minus Roof.

In Minus Roof visitors to the Centre on 18 July were taken to Bourn Airfield and flown over Wysing to look down into the gallery space from the air, aided by the fact that one third part of the gallery roof had been taken off for the purpose. Other visitors experienced an open gallery with a section of roof removed with the Cambridgeshire sky and flight activity on view from within the space. To read more about the event click here.

These two places and viewpoints were brought together in the double projected film currently showing in the gallery, also entitled Minus Roof. In recent years A KASSEN have evolved their work into a collaborative playground for projects that seek to re-imagine the encounter between artwork and public; realising projects that have a comic book quality and even producing a comic book of their ideas.

Read Jonathan Griffin's blog post about A Kassen's Minus Roof on the Frieze Blog here.

Communities under Construction was funded by Paul Hamlyn Foundation and Arts Council England East. A Kassen was supported by the Danish Arts Council and Danish Embassy in London. With thanks to all at Bourn Airfield, especially to Richard and Lindsey, Jo Jo Taylor for filming and editing and South Lincs Cladding.

Wysing Arts Centre invited Berlin based artists Folke Köbberling and Martin Kaltwasser to create an ‘amphitheatre’ on Wysing’s rural site, working with a team of volunteers and using only discarded, found and recycled materials.

Click on the image to see the building in progress.

Köbberling and Kaltwasser's unique approach to creating buildings for communal use – the materials they use and work with are always unwanted and liberated by the artists to be transformed into something not only beautiful but functional - created a very particular environment of sharing and generosity around Amphis. Over a two month period many people came to Wysing to drop-off their unwanted materials. Many also helped to build the structure and many more returned to take part in a series of discussions and film screenings around the project.

Amphis crosses the disciplines of art and architecture and much of the thinking behind the project comes from their shared interest in changes within architecture. What Kobberling and Kaltwasser set out to do with Amphis was create a structure that embraced the ideas of many people in one big patchwork ‘house’ filled with practical, structural and sculptural elements. Every element of Amphis was built using materials donated to the project and built by a community of 40 volunteers without whom the project - conceptually as well as practically - would not have been possible.

Amphis volunteers were:, Danny Boyle, Claire Ward, Robin Turner, CJ Mahony, Bryony Graham, Debbie Lauder, Linda Thomas, Phoebe O'Donnell, Rachel Barker, Gideon Pain, Heath Bunting, Ele Holloway, Elizabeth Murton, Christina Green, Ben Short, Stephen Draycott, Mark Mau, Jane & David Crawford White, Charlotte & Martin Parker Hall, Julian Brown and family. Kim Stephens, Steve & Paul Carpenter, Judy Cowell, Andrew Tanser, William Cruikshank, Charlotte Schneider, Clara Grosse (apologies if we have forgotten anyone!)

And with many thanks to the following for donation of materials: Lucas Morley, Donarbon, Hill Partnerships, Redrow Homes, St Neots, The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, O'Sullivan Shopfitting Ltd, Cambridge, Labute Group Ltd, Cambridge, SDC Builders Ltd, 5th Studio Architects, KA Anderton Haulage, Bourn, Mess Hall Chicago. And to Stephen Robinson for the loan of his van.
 

N55 is a collective of artists based in Denmark who see art as part of everyday life and who are particularly interested in architecture and design. It is a non-commercial platform and they document their works and interventions in the form of manuals, so they can be developed by third parties.

Their vision of a democratically organized collaborating body of self-reliant individuals is described in their writing and embodied in their designs. Most of their writing takes the form of manuals, and for Wysing Arts Centre they produced a Walking House manual. The manual was developed into a fully functioning object following Interact, an Arts Council funded placement.

The concept of the Walking House came out of N55’s residency at Wysing in 2007, during which they researched the lifestyles and legal concerns relating to some of Cambridge’s community of people of traveller origin. N55 took the concept of the historic model of the 18th century Romany horse carriage - as a tool for mobility that has a minimal effect on the environment - and re-worked it for the 21st century. Working closely with specialists at MIT Institute of Engineering in Massachusetts they built a fully functioning Walking House – the house walks using adapted linear actuators. The design allows the structure to move slowly at the same pace as a human can walk, about 5km an hour in real terms.
 

Walking House is a modular system that allows people to live a peaceful nomadic life, moving slowly through the landscape with minimal impact on the environment. It collects energy from its surroundings using solar and wind power, it is not reliant on any road infrastructure and can move on all types of terrain.

The Walking House adapts to people rather than people having to adapt to the house, so by adding further modules human social needs and changing demands from single living occupancy changing to families can be accommodated. Walking House forms various sizes of communities – even walking villages when two or more units are added together.

Walking House was at Wysing from 23rd October to 30th November and through 2009. Click here for more information. The Walking House also travelled to the Ruhr region of Germany for the International Capital of Culture 2010 and continues to travel to different communities across northern Europe.

Visit N55’s website here for a Manual for micro dwelling.

Seja Marginal, Seja Herói (Be Marginal, Be a Hero) parts 1-5
Part 5: Mess Hall, 18 May - 10 June

During 2007 Wysing re-located to central Cambridge, converting a discused car showroom in the Romsey area into a temporary gallery and project space. We invited five international artists' collectives to be resident in a programme that celebrated the marginal. The fifth collective to occupy the space were Mess Hall (USA).

Mess Hall from Chicago incorporated a whopping twelve different events into their residency – everything from clothes-making and franken-furniture recycling workshops to a communal hugging events and sewing workshops, which included sewing members of the public together via their clothes. As part of the residency Mess Hall hosted the independant publishing fair, Publish and Be Damned.

This photo shows members of Mess Hall with Sebastian Ramirez (second left) who was Wysing Curator at the time and curated Seja Marginal, Seja Herói.

Seja Marginal, Seja Herói (Be Marginal, Be a Hero) parts 1-5
Part 4: Platoniq, 20 April - 13 May

During 2007 Wysing re-located to central Cambridge, converting a discused car showroom in the Romsey area into a temporary gallery and project space. We invited five international artists' collectives to be resident in a programme that celebrated the marginal. The fourth collective to occupy the space were Platoniq (Spain).

Platoniq’s contribution to Seja Marginal, Seja Herói provided a context for their new commission Blockbooster, which was part of the Enter_ festival of art and technology, which Wysing was involved in organising. 

As well as a more formal exhibition they turned the space into an alternative learning centre, staging skills swaps and talks on knowledge exchange, including creative commons and open-source software. Platoniq used the space as their HQ from where they web streamed all events and activity.

Seja Marginal, Seja Herói (Be Marginal, Be a Hero) parts 1-5
Part 3: La Culpable, 23 March -15 April

During 2007 Wysing re-located to central Cambridge, converting a discused car showroom in the Romsey area into a temporary gallery and project space. We invited five international artists' collectives to be resident in a programme that celebrated the marginal. The third collective to occupy the space were La Culpable (Peru).

La Culpable embraced being on Mill Road and for two weeks were in the space every day and evening, talking and interviewing local residents for an ongoing radio broadcast. They also compiled a CD of music, recipes and opinions of Mill Road residents and then broadcast it in the space and also hosted a number of film screenings and events. They also installed a kitchen area and cooked many delicious free meals for the public.

Seja Marginal, Seja Herói (Be Marginal, Be a Hero) parts 1-5
Part 2: i-cabin, 23 Feb -18 March

During 2007 Wysing re-located to central Cambridge, converting a discused car showroom in the Romsey area into a temporary gallery and project space. We invited five international artists' collectives to be resident in a programme that celebrated the marginal. The second collective to occupy the space were i-cabin (Juliette Blightman and Sebastian Craig, London).

i-cabin took the overall title for the project Be Marginal, Be a Hero and transposed it to their marginalised position within the London arts scene. They invited artists who had set up their own project spaces to comment on how they operated in an arts scene dominated by so many other galleries, all of whom were apparently pursuing the same artists for their programmes.

The artists organised an in-conversation with Richard Birkett, at the time Curator at  the Whitechapel Project Space.

Seja Marginal, Seja Herói (Be Marginal, Be a Hero) parts 1-5
Part 1: Danger Museum, 19 January -11 February

During 2007 Wysing re-located to central Cambridge, converting a discused car showroom in the Romsey area into a temporary gallery and project space. We invited five international artists' collectives to be resident in the space, in a programme that celebrated the marginal. First to take up residence was Danger Museum (Norway and Singapore).

Danger Museum approached Cambridge as a “a field for exploration, a place for scientific exploration and a site with its own local history and mystery.” They researched some of Cambridge’s historic collections, including Kettle’s Yard, The Fitzwilliam Museum, The Folk Museum and the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, and included objects from their collections in the narrative of a large wall painting.

They also curated a film series by other artists including John Smith and Jacques Tati. And Dr Mark Elliott of the Mseum of Archaeology and Anthropology gave a talk on objects from their collection.

Shezad Dawood was commissioned by Wysing to make a film to commemorate the opening of our new buildings in 2008. Shez was in-residence at Wysing across 2006 and 2007 producing the new film Feature which, like much of his work, engaged with mythologies, authenticity, multiple authorship and intercultural interpretations.

Click on the image to see behind-the-scenes shots and film stills.

Dawood spent four months in residence at Wysing, making contact with local people and groups to invite them to take part in the film: a jockey, trainer and two thoroughbred racehorses from the nearby town of Newmarket; an all-Chinese football team, currently in the 5th Division; a Western re-enactment group The Outlaws; a local choir The Fairhaven Singer; a soprano from the Royal Danish Opera who sang Wagner's Valkyrie; plus guest appearances by well-known artists and countless local villagers who came in costume to try out for a part in open casting sessions.

Feature was conceived and filmed as a series of performances linked by an overarching narrative of The Battle of Little Big Horn, possibly the most famous war between Native Americans and Federal Government. Scenic backdrops which interface with the landscape have been inserted into a series of mock-historical vignettes interlaced with fictional interludes all featuring a cast of well known artists and musicians alongside local performers. These dislocations aim to challenge the residual idea of authenticity and create a new open-ended text that feeds back into a narrative dynamic - that of the process itself. At the same time the film engages a critical inquiry into the Western as a site for mediation and colonial critique.

A number of Dawood's works to date have played with elements from film history, often restaging historical moments. In Feature he builds on this by recasting Lord Krishna of Hindu mythology as a cowboy alongside playing with the genre of the revisionist Westerns of Altman and Peckinpah and also the zombie films of the 1970s. With a cast of internationally reputed artists including Jimmie Durham (cast as narrator Sioux holyman Sitting Bull) and David Medalla (cast as Chief Crazy Horse), a key aspect of the film's originality lies in Dawood's continued interest in using fellow artists as collaborators and performers as a way to deconstruct identities and mythologies surrounding a particular genre and the relationships between practitioners and audience.

"Feature draws upon my interest in the Western film as a site of continuous reversal - from classic westerns to the revisionist westerns of Little Big Man and Dances with Wolves, together with their complicated legacies which have been further satirised by figures such as Marco Ferreri in Ne Touchez Pas a la Femme Blanche that relocates The Battle of Little Big Horn to the Paris suburbs of the 1970s, or Robert Altman's Buffalo Bill & the Indians." - S.D.

The finished film was screened at the Cambridge Film Festival September 2008 as well as galleries throughout the country, including Tate.

Subsequently a book of the making of Feature was commissioned by BookWorks and published in June 2008.

The London based artists collective Public Works worked with Bourn map-makers, ramblers, land-owners and local primary school during a year-long residency from, 2006-2007, and explored creative ways of talking about the local area.

 

The residency culminated in the exhibition - Cross Country: An Exploration into Rural Public Space 20 March - 27 April 2008.

For three days before the exhibition launch a temporary structure was sited at Riddy Lane, Bourn, from where guided walks, talks and rambles took place, followed by map making workshops led by artists at the structure itself and back at Wysing's new Reception building.

Wapke Feenstra from Myvillages.org also took part in both the exhibition and the talks - together with Torange Khonsari from Public Works hosting a one day debate asking ‘What is the role of rural space and culture?’

The temporary structure then travelled to Wysing to occupy the gallery space, joining other works by artists N55, Jose Arnaud-Bello - who had both worked with people of Traveller origin in the area. Wapke Feenstra and the Bibliobox - a travelling archive of rural art practice featured in the gallery exhibition - the culmination of the past year's residencies.

Public Works is an art/architecture collective consisting of architects Torange Khonsari, Andreas Lang and artist Kathrin Bohm, who have been collaborating in different constellations since 1998.

Autumn 2005

Juneau Projects (Phil Duckworth and Ben Sadler) were in-residence during autumn 2005 during which time they developed a computer game based on locations around Wysing and some of the people the two met during their residency.

The residency culminated in the gallery exhibition The Black Moss which had been organised by Ikon Gallery and which at Wysing included the new work that had been developed here entitled Beneath the floorboards of the forest, empty space. The Black Moss explored a range of themes including our daily reliance on electronic, hi-tech items; the darker side of nature, akin to the Romantic tradition whereby nature inspires both awe and terror; music and wish fulfilment and identification with pop stars by adolescents!

The exhibition included a live performance by Juneau Projects on 27 May 2006 which took the form of tribute to two imagined bands: compositions written by young people alongside the artists’ own compositions.

Summer 2005

Artists Neil Bromwich and Zoe walker were in-residence during 2005 and developed the Friendly Frontier Picnic event.

Friendly Frontier is an inflatable mountain range equipped with emergency slides to bridge international borders. It is a symbolic territory that operates as an open border to be used like a child’s toy to slide with ease between nation states. It has become the
focal point for a number of public events, inviting participants to consider the ideal of a world living in peace and collaboration together.

For Wysing the artists organised an event during which dolls, representing nations, would be thrown across the frontier in a gesture of crossing boundaries and borders.