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.