Cos Ahmet

Originally from London, I now live and work in the Liverpool region, where I share a studio space at The Royal Standard. My practice started out in sculpture and installation, and has evolved to include performance, the moving image and collaboration.

There is no denying that the human subject and material matters have an impact on my practice. I am attracted to the everyday, mundane or domestic materials. I tend not to use them as presented, preferring to change their original purpose to fabricate a new language – their non-human condition provokes me to give them a different meaning and place in my practice.

The sound a material transmits also intrigues me. I hear them in a particular way when working or performing with them – they translate as ‘inverted audios’ – this is how they sound to me in that moment, so typically, a reversed sound or audio often become part of a work. This tentative play with sound as a sculptural device creates a form of sonic material in response to discourses around choreography and new materialism, bringing attention to the somatic engagement with bodies both human and object-material related.

One of many contextual influences surrounding these discourses include the writing of visual artist and philosopher, Erin Manning – author of ’Always More Than One: Individuations Dance’, where my interest in the choreographic object grew.

A new work always begins with a basic idea behind it, but I prefer not to over think how I start a new piece. Instead, the mix of a general idea or direction together with the ‘unknown or chance’ moment, often referred to as a happy accident, can present an impromptu response that feeds into a work.

I am working with fellow artist and collaborator, Gary Finnegan. We have worked on various film and sound installation projects. Our work is an ongoing dialogue where our diverse practices become enhanced when our works merge with one another. Collaboration casts a fresh eye on a way of working and thinking. We both work on the basis that we only disclose or reveal what we have worked on when we bring it back to the studio, and this is the stage that I find interesting – the parallels or cross-over of concepts, and occasionally imagery, that emerges between the films when they come together. Our collaborative approach is one that places no compromise on each others methods, so are able to retain those characteristics that our own work and individual practices hold.

Cos Ahmet’s portfolio →

Cassandra Celestin

I’ve always been drawn to how the past shows up in physical form and people’s relationship with the past through these things. Especially domestic things that are or were part of someone’s everyday life, the things that seem unimportant and fragile, not meant for official record. To a great extent, this interest came from growing up between New York and Greece, places with very different approaches to their pasts. While I’ve documented these things through photography and the moving image for a long time, I never went to film or art school. Instead, I chose to pursue formal studies in history / cultural studies and the ways in which history is “done,” always meaning to incorporate my visual work to attempt new ways of understanding the past and its relationship to the present.

Walking in urban spaces, observing and being part of the dense, complex, and dynamic systems of human interactions found there. I like being in the mid-point between reading a landscape and being overwhelmed by it.

I start new works slowly, after a period of research (this could involve reading across a range of sources, visiting museum collections and archives, walking around a specific area, speaking with people about the subject.) All of my films so far have started with a specific type of physical thing, like a small object or a kind of architectural ornament. My shoots involve a lot of walking to places where those things are found, creating a collection of images I store until I’m ready for an edit. Going to the places and seeing the things up close leads to new ideas, so I fluctuate between shooting and doing more research before going back out. In some ways, it’s a process of collecting.

My new project starts from my family’s extensive collection of photo albums which spans about 80 years, documenting their lives in Haiti and then New York, where they immigrated. I’m focusing on the physical things that weren’t always at the center of these photos, such as the fabrics of people’s clothing, the jewelry people were wearing, table settings, gardens. A lot is inadvertently told about broader social realities in these feminized items. I’m also interested in shooting the photos and albums themselves, turning them into recorded things, and creating another physical artifact – this time, a film – to ask questions about the preservation of physical things and why it matters (or doesn’t.)

Cassandra Celestin’s portfolio →

Dafna Maimon

I grew up in Finland in a half-immigrant entrepreneur family and had a pretty chaotic upbringing. Humor, laughing and adaptation is a big part of my “origin-story”. I studied in Amsterdam, first sculpture, then time based art. I’ve been formed by living, working and traveling in Europe and the U.S and all the friends and collaborators I’ve encountered along the way.

Embodied practices, moving, listening, studying my body, and the way body-minds carry and express trauma, joy and aliveness. Relationships, (to self and others) the psychology within them, porousness and conversations with collaborators weather they be verbal or through co-creation. A pursuit of trying to understand and surpass the various systemic social codes we all suffer from.

Usually within or from conversation, or from ideas that come in reaction to something that is difficult or mind-boggling to me. Sometimes it can be one drawing that gets me going, an image in my mind, a title, or a scene, and then I build a world around it. I never start a work unless the idea of it made me laugh.

Embracing more inner weirdness, looking for it, hoping it will emerge by digging and playing. I’m singing a lot at the moment, without a clear idea where it will take me next. After just having made a performance with my doodle-like songs, I imagine turning them into “music” videos or performative spaces next. An artist book is also in the making.

Dafna Maimon’s portfolio →

Noé Grenier

I was born in a high mountain hamlet in 1987 and I grew up between the Alps and the southwest of France. I started working with moving images at the Beaux Arts de Montpellier from which I graduated in 2011. After three years in Brussels, I then continued my studies at the Fresnoy Studio National des arts Contemporain. I am associate artist at La Malterie in Lille where I am based, while travelling frequently to Italy.

Here is a tentative list of things that inspire me :
mode of human transport, evolution of the screens, tornadoes and natural risks, old matte painting, Don Quichotte and the problem of reality, how the memory works, stories of plagiarism, the idea of cyclic time, migraine trips, sound poetry, the movement of the mountains, science fiction and the speed of light.

Each project starts in a different way. Some works like my last film The Following images never happened impose themselves to me through a strong necessity of creation and experimentation. Other projects come from an in-depth research over a long period of time, like the short story Le Tardif and the film The Sunstill.
In my collaborative projects with Gilles Ribero and Gwendal Sartre, our ideas for exhibitions and films come from conversations and crossed interests between our personal works.

I am at the beginning of a new project, a documentary temporarily called “Patine et lacune” dealing with the restoration and conservation of old films and paintings.

Noé Grenier’s portfolio →

n. stevik

I originally got interested in art around 16/17 yrs, after getting into experimental music because it is often tied to visual art(ists).

Funny enough less (contemporary) fine arts and more other media mainly (video) games, memes, youtube videos/streamers, fanart but also tv-shows, movies and books. If it’s fine art, then usually artists who explore similiar things as me.

I often make notes of what I’m generally interested in but usually only start work in context of a project and a deadline, like an exhibition, a workshop or music release usually working with in a theme dictated by me and/or the organizers. If I work more aimlessly it’s usually when making music.

Mainly on a new music release exploring modular synthesis and sectarianism in leftist circles and also making music with my band. I do wanna come back to visual media too even if it’s just in context of the art direction of the release I’m working on.

n. stevik’s portfolio →

Louise Ashcroft

I studied at Ruskin School of Art (Oxford University) before co-founding a free, open, non-accredited postgrad called AltMFA and went to night school at Birkbeck College London to do an MA in Cultural and Critical Studies. I’m from Bradford in the North of England, and my approach to gleaning and intervening is connected to my family’s history of being resourceful and getting by, practicing freedom within the constraints of their lives as ordinary working people in the mills and foundries that kickstarted the industrial revolution, leading to global capitalism as we know it.

I find sites that interest me and become curious, often through walking, photographing, note-taking and collecting. My findings are linked together to create narratives, and sometimes I respond through playful acts of resistance that change the status quo of the places I encounter. I’m influenced by situationism, fluxus, political theatre, jugaad (indian life-hacks), psycho-geography and critical comedy.

I tend to embed myself in a place and spend time there, researching through noticing, writing and responding. A site can be a location or an archive, existing artwork, or virtual space. It’s quite a forensic process; often constructing fictions from the evidence I find. Performative (live) writing and writing through live participatory experiences is something I find generative. I like going to trade fairs, and finding situations which have power dynamics of systems of control, then I figure out how to break the rules and change the hierarchies without getting in trouble. I use systems against themselves.

I’ve got a 1 woman 1 hour solo performance on at Camden People’s Theatre, it’s about my ambivalence around not having kids, and the barriers to reproduction that many people face (queer reproduction rights etc), plus how genetics has been outsourced to capitalism in many ways. I’m very interested in biohacking and the future of experimental biology. In the show I talk about trips to fertility trade fairs and building a DIY sperm bank outside my house; it’s a very serious comedy. I’ll be doing a talk with other childless people in Bremen (Germany) in October to extend this research. The work will lead to experiments in how to be a parent without having kids – how to reinvent the nuclear family by teaming up with friends who struggle to juggle work and childcare, and exploring histories of mutual aid. I am also renting a telephone box in the City of London financial district and writing a new video/performance about trying to take on authority through small acts and gestures in the birthplace of banking as we know it.

Louise Ashcroft’s portfolio →

Nick Smith

I am a working class visual artist and photographer. I am at a strange point in my life where I have nearly lived in London for as long as I lived in Liverpool, where I grew up. I am interested in how that experience has somehow programmed who I am.

My moving image works are influenced by landscape paintings of the industrialised north, social realist British documentary makers and photographers as well as DJ sets from early UK Techno, Jungle and House pioneers.

I will have a general feeling about a moment or image or bit of footage or memory that lingers and I will usually bring it up in conversation and observe the response it gets. I’ll then write down my thoughts and feelings on the idea and from that will start to research and think about how that could then become an image.

I am finishing a film about the shift from public to private housing called ‘It’s A Done Deal’ and making a body photographic works off the back of the film. In addition I am researching another film which I will start late 2022 early 2023 about influential club venues in Liverpool called ‘Comedown’.

Nick Smith’s portfolio →

Duncan Poulton

I grew up in Birmingham, UK, where I went to school before doing an art foundation at School of Art Bournville. Both my parents are designer-makers. I took my undergraduate studies in Fine Art Critical Practice at the University of Brighton, before moving to London to work in the moving image industry. From 2019–21 I did an alternative postgraduate programme called the Syllabus which was run by Wysing Arts Centre and a consortium of other UK galleries.

On a daily basis I’m wandering about the streets like a magpie looking for inspiration – graffiti, chewed up posters, objects arranged in rubbish piles – but I’m most actively influenced by amateur and ‘prosumer’ content I find online, which I end up collaging into my work. I also watch a lot of films and look at a lot of art, and lately have been getting more into fiction. Recently I’ve been looking back at the work of artists like Marc Chagall, Sigmar Polke, Robert Rauschenberg and Manfred Pernice. Music and video games are also another big underlying influence, particularly those who concatenate different styles and historical periods within new work.

I’m always drawn to the phrase “I’ll know it when I see it” – my work begins with a gathering process, and I’m constantly on the lookout for new seeds of work. These seeds may become still digital collages, or go into moving image works, or both. Quite often its finding two or three of these seeds that collide together in an interesting way, that will make me start drawing up a new video.

I’m preparing for a big digital showcase of my work at Outernet in central London in collaboration with WeTransfer, and making a new video installation for a solo show with Division of Labour gallery in Manchester, which opens Spring 2023. I’m excited to try working with animation and AI with this, and am collaborating on a new curatorial/archive project with Nick Smith for a screening in early 2023 in London.

Duncan Poulton’s portfolio →

Alex Culshaw

I grew up in North Yorkshire. After studying an art foundation in Leeds I moved to London to study Fine Art at Goldsmiths and I’ve pretty much stayed in London since. I also studied Moving Image at RCA between 2015 and 2017.

Anything and everything! Most at the moment, music, autofiction, the news, talking to people and collaborating, walking around and sitting on public transport, staring out of the window.

I usually get hooked on a narrative or an image/piece of footage. If it’s a narrative I’ll go round and round in circles thinking about how best to retell it and start researching into details or analogies. If it’s a piece of footage then I tend to mess around editing it and something usually comes from that.

This year I’ve been learning Resolume Avenue (a software for live visuals) and making moving image work in response to other people’s sound/music. I can’t recommend the software highly enough for playing with effects and working intuitively.

I’m also working on a larger project that uses psychological research and studies as a starting point. The work critiques points of exclusion and examine industrial environments in relation to the human body and mind. This is taking a while to work through and is research heavy so I’m glad to have two different projects on the go.

Alex Culshaw’s portfolio →

Melanie Jame Wolf

I’ve arrived at making moving image work from a background in theater and choreography. As such, I’m really interested in approaching filmmaking as an expanded choreographic practice.

When I encounter a work of art so intricately layered in its intelligence and wit and devotion to formal inquiry that I felt like the edges of my body are dissolving in some kind of haptic communion with the sculpture, the text, the edit, the song.

I find the idea of art making being a lifetime of learning in public to be a persuasive one.

I think about Lucretia Martel’s La Cienaga all the time, and Chantal Ackerman, and Lizzie Borden. Distinctive voices with clear, persistent formal signatures.

I generally start with an image, a vision. Then as I work to materialise the vision – often failing – I parse out the references, the thinking around it, try again and try to deepen the ways in which the work will be an invitation.

A collaboration with choreographer Martin Hansen called The Superimposition that will look at dance scenes as ruptures in narrative features. And a video and textile installation series called The Creep, which will be about Walter Benjamin’s idea of Mythic Violence, and the device of the unreliable narrator.

Melanie Jame Wolf’s portfolio →