New Writing with New Contemporaries
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New Writing with New Contemporaries offered emerging artists who worked with writing as part of their practice, mentoring sessions to develop new text based works. The artists were also offered the opportunity to showcase these works through public performances at South London Gallery (2021); Online (2020) and at Leeds Art Gallery and South London Gallery (2019). Writing for performance and spoken word are increasingly popular forms for contemporary art practice. This series created a new model for supporting and publicly presenting experimental writing by talented emerging artists from across the UK.
Participating Artists 2021
Christopher Bond is an artist and writer currently based in London. Engaged with storytelling, his work analyses the queer body in relation to systems of order – in nature, in nightlife, in cities. Often creating objects and posters from speculative futures, alongside fictional texts, Bond’s work outlines situations in which mass bio-political revolutions have occurred. Recent projects have included sex-worker-positive tattoos, queer doomsday preppers, future AI porn categories, love letters to Oleg Kulik and musings on the form of the antler.
Katarina Ranković is a video, performance and text-based artist interested in the mechanics of self. Her work explores whether fictional characters can be reverse-engineered into persons and conceived as literary prototypes of general artificial intelligence. Current projects include Anomaline, a novel about an anti-person; Vernacular Spectacular, a one-woman empathy circus; and Scripting for Agency, a research project about writing agents. As a Yorkshire-born Serb raised in Norway and working in London, both the theory and practice of Katarina’s work originates from the daily necessity of inhabiting and switching between many selves.
Rebeca Romero’s practice explores the connections between technology and an all too often imposed Western vision of history. Through a range of media – including sculpture, image manipulation, performance and video – she approaches concepts of diasporic identity, truth, fiction and their relationship to the digital age. The recent inclusion of new, disruptive technologies into her work, such as 3D scanning and printing, raises further questions surrounding production, automation and processes of exchange. Overall, Romero seeks to question ideas and practices of history-making, representation, appropriation and authorship.
Agnieszka Szczotka’s practice draws on references as disparate as the Catholic imaginarium, feminist avant-garde, self-portraiture, pop songs and psychology, as a means to examine the role of the unreliable narrator. Interweaving personal narratives, historical events and various modes of knowledge production, Szczotka embodies a vast cast of personas that inhabit her performances, videos, photographs and texts. Embracing dark humour, affect and repetition she questions individual and collective memory as a means to challenge received knowledge and exorcise the past.
Adrianna Whittingham is a London-based artist working with writing, performance, audio and installation. Through absurdist, personal and visceral sensory narratives, she explores and references her Jamaican cultural heritage, employing political undertones in relation to aggregate moods and opinions.
Participating Artists 2020
Zethu Maseko's work explores ancient and contemporary mythology in relation to identity. She practices indigenising her internal and external conversation around the human experience, specifically in relation to water and interconnectedness with the land. She works across performance, film, costume, tapestry, sound and often delivers workshops. Zethu describes herself as a Cultural worker, artist, curator and is founder and practicing member of North London Creative Resistance. She graduated from Goldsmiths, University of London in 2020 with a First Class BA (Hons) in Fine Art and on graduating was awarded the Nicholas and Andrie Tooth Travelling Scholarship and selected for New Contemporaries 2020.
Rene Matić (b. 1997, Peterborough) is an artist currently working in London. Their work brings together themes of post-blackness, glitch feminism and subcultural theory in a meeting place they describe as rude(ness) – bringing to light (or dark) the fated conflicts and contradictions that one encounters while navigating the world in a body like their own. Matić’s research reaches back to post-war Britain and the survival tactics and ‘tap dances’ of Britain’s Brown babies. They take their departure point from dance and music movements such as Northern soul, Ska and 2-Tone. Matić’s current work predominantly explores the Skinhead movement, its founding as a multicultural marriage between West Indian and white working-class culture and its subsequent co-option by far-right white supremacists. They use this as a metaphor to examine their own experience of living in the Black British diaspora, to excavate white jealousy, the continued legacy of colonialism and the fear of a Black planet – all things which find convergence within and upon their mixed-race identity.
Sophie Ruigrok is an artist working in drawing and painting, and is currently exploring sound. She graduated from The Drawing Year at the Royal Drawing School in December 2019, and has since been selected for New Contemporaries 2020. In 2020, she exhibited in London and Amsterdam and took part in a residential programme at ecological co-op, Montemero, in Almería, Spain. Throughout 2021 she will be an artist in residence and community facilitator at Proposition’s Studio’s Eco-Syntax residency in Derbyshire, UK. Sophie writes art criticism and has contributed to frieze, Apollo, Dazed, Elephant and thisistomorrow.
Anna-Rose Stefatou (b. 1996) is a Greek-British interdisciplinary artist; she primarily works with moving image and writing. She completed a BA Fine Art at The Slade School of Fine Art in London (2019), during which she took a semester abroad at The Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna (2018). In her work, poetics and ecology merge through imagery that traces itself back to both cosmic and personal memory archives; the entanglement of time, light and memory is at the centre of her practice. She looks into the landscapes of kinship between human and more-than human beings, through slippage and rupture.
Ahren Warner writes, makes films and takes photographs. Recent work has included the book and film The sea is spread and cleaved and furled (Prototype, 2020) and a book of poems and photographs, Hello. Your promise has been extracted (Bloodaxe, 2017). His work has been exhibited at venues including the Nikola Tesla Museum (Zagreb), Centro de Cultura Digital (Mexico City) and Great North Museum (Newcastle), whilst he also appears regularly at literary events and festivals, including for the BBC Proms, Royal Festival Hall and British Council. A new book, I’m *totally* killing your vibes, is due to be published by Bloodaxe in 2021.
Participating Artists 2019
Jude Browning is an artist and writer based in Glasgow whose work examines the voice and acts of writing and performance. As an artist she uses text to explore how writing may initiate the staged display of a figure to be observed.
Lucy Rose Cunningham employs the use of writing and audio-visual work to explore fleeting moments of sound and movement conveying love, loss and change.
Freya Dooley works with writing, moving image, sound and performance. Her work combines literary and pop-culture references to create unstable narratives, soundtracks and semi-fictions.
Malachy Harvey works with writing, moving-image and sculpture to stage artworks as sites of requisite tension between contradicting desires and emotional states.
Ruby Lewis is an artist whose practise examines the body as a site of cultural legacy. She is part of the poetry collective Context, which hosts spoken word events in Leeds.
Leo Hermitt is a Manchester based artist, designer, writer and poet. Leo explores storytelling, the idea of in-betweeness and marginalised experience, seeking to document, empower and liberate through interdisciplinary and socially engaged practices.
