About
Artists
Amit Sihag
Artist
Artist Bio
Jaipur-based photographer Amit Sihag comes from an agricultural background in the state of Punjab in North India. He grew up documenting life in villages, around cattle, fields, farmers and all else that comprises rural life. Trained as an engineer he later followed his dream by studying photography at the Sir J.J School of Applied Art in Mumbai. Seeing life through the viewfinder of his camera became and continues to be his meditation. His native Punjab deeply informs his heart, eyes and work, which spans fashion, lifestyle, luxury, travel and social documentary.
Sihag’s work has appeared in Vogue Italia, Conde Nast Traveller, Apparel, L’ Officiel, Carpet XL, AD, Cover, Object, Outlook, JetWings, Better Homes, iDecorama, Get Inspired, JPG, Vogue UK, Times Of India, The Hindu, IndiaToday, Elle Decor and more. He has worked extensively with Indian and International brands. Social documentary is core to his practice, people both abstract and documentary are his passion. His work captures the art and creativity that so warms his soul, as well as the acceptance of co-existence and diversity that make India so magical and captivating.
Artwork Description
With JUST US!, Sihag celebrates the resilience of the often-faceless Indian agrarian community, amongst whom he was raised, using exaggerated and brightly-coloured tribal masks to draw attention to their existence, and thereby their struggle.
Quote about the theme
I hope to inspire appreciation of the Indian agrarian population, and of their commitment, tenacity and fortitude.
Azraa Motala
Artist
Artist Bio
Azraa Motala is a visual artist from Preston, currently based between the North West and the Midlands. Her practice and research explores the lived experiences of British South Asian women, including notions of identity, belonging, culture and heritage within the context of the contemporary Western space. Negotiating the position of insider and outsider in and amongst the familiar and foreign. Through large scale oil paintings, photography, poetry, video and site specific interventions she explores the polarity of the East and West, history, politics, empire and orientalist depictions of women in art.
Artwork Description
Brit-ish is an intimate visual representation of Motala’s complex relationship with her South-Asian and British identity, and references her time spent living in the South Lakes – a rural environment of the kind that can sometimes feel isolating to people of colour, and in which they are rarely portrayed.
Quote about the theme
I speak to my nana in broken sentences, Stringing together phrases of Guajarati and English. We talk about home and mangoes and sugar cane, I’m left nostalgic for a place I haven’t been. Living in the spaces between two continents. England and India a child of diaspora.
David Blackmore
Artist
Artist Bio
David Blackmore is a European Artist with two sides to his practice. One is studio based, working with sculpture and print. The other consists of transgressive actions performed for the image and relational exchanges. Hinged on the boundary areas between order and dissent he takes material from the familiar and disregarded aspects of civic life to explore a frustration with the way our lives are dictated to by systems of order.
David has exhibited widely and completed a Masters in Fine Art at the Slade School of Fine Art (London, Uk). David’s studio is located at Chisenhale Studios Bow and he is a Fellow of the Royal Society for the encouragement of the Arts.
Artwork Description
European Pa55port documents Blackmore’s performative response to being denied a non-nation-specific European Passport from the EU, during which he removed the national insignia from both his British and Irish passports, leaving only the words ‘European Union’.
Quote about the theme
I no longer consider myself as either Irish or British, I am European.
Fiona McBennett
Artist
Artist Bio
Chihiro Fiona McBennett (b. 2001) is an Irish-Japanese visual artist based in London. Her work explores the complex relationship between identity and social standards through self-portraiture. In her projects, she often delves into topics such as nostalgia and cultural dysphoria as a way to connect with her own identity.
Artwork Description
McBennett explores the feelings of rootlessness and cultural dysphoria she has experienced as a biracial woman who grew up in contrasting cultures, by using AI to morph her face with the ‘Miss Average’ faces of all the countries that people have presumed she is from.
Quote about the theme
This piece is a confrontation to all of those who have made me question my own cultural identity.
Ian Wainaina
Artist
Artist Bio
Wainaina is a Kenyan visual artist based in Berlin, Germany. His work is deeply rooted in his personal experiences of finding a sense of belonging and identity within a predominantly white, western society, having grown up in Kenya. Through a carefully calculated use of abstraction, materiality, and experimentation, Wainaina’s art invites viewers to engage in new and unpredictable cycles of thought and association.
Artwork Description
Home is Far Away builds on Wainaina’s ongoing exploration of the multifaceted nature of identity and the need for a sense of place, with two girls gazing pensively towards the vast Atlantic Ocean and the viewer unclear on whether they are looking forward or back, to a new life or one left behind.
Quote about the theme
This artwork was inspired by my experiences growing up in Kenya, attending university in the US, and now residing in Berlin as an artist.
Larry Achiampong
Artist
Artist Bio
Larry Achiampong’s projects employ film, still imagery, aural and visual archives, live performance, objects and sound to explore ideas surrounding class, gender, cross-cultural and digital identity.
With works that examine his communal and personal heritage – in particular, the intersection between popular culture and the residues of colonisation, Achiampong crate-digs the vaults of history. These investigations examine constructions of ‘the self’ through the activity of splicing the audible and visual materials of personal and interpersonal archives, offering multiple perspectives that reveal the deeply entrenched inequalities in contemporary society.
Achiampong (b. 1984, UK, British Ghanaian) is a BAFTA longlisted (2023) and Jarman Award nominated (2021) artist, filmmaker and musician. He completed a BA in Mixed Media Fine Art at University of Westminster in 2005 and an MA in Sculpture at The Slade School of Fine Art in 2008. In 2020 Achiampong was awarded the Stanley Picker fellowship and in 2019 received the Paul Hamlyn Artist award in recognition for his practice. He lives and works in London and Essex, and was a tutor on the Photography MA programme at Royal College of Art between 2016 – 2021. Achiampong served on the Board of Trustees at Iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts, 2017-2022) facilitating art policies in the UK and internationally and also holds a place on the board of trustees for Elephant Trust. He is represented by Copperfield, London and his films are distributed by LUX, London. Achiampong also holds a Black Belt (1st Dan) in Goju Ryu Karate Do and is a student of Kaizen Ryu Seiwakai East London.
Artwork Description
Part of Achiampong’s multi-disciplinary Relic Traveller project, DUALTIES examines postcolonial perspectives, the enduring connection between those born within the African continent and those of the African Diaspora, and the recent and growing phenomenon of returning diasporas.
Quote about the theme
Taking place across various landscapes and locations, the project builds upon a postcolonial perspective informed by technology, agency and the body, and narratives of migration.
Lori Gordon
Artist
Artist Bio
Lori Gordon is a conceptual artist. Her practice investigates the structure and power of belief, often through collaborative endeavours. Gordon has been accumulating an archive of dissected conversations that appeal to her. These snippets and fragments of things she has overheard or had said directly to her, are inevitably interpreted by the viewer as advertising; poetry; or an insider joke, but she is interested in that ambiguity as well. As the late Bruno Mauro once shared, “Gordon does not assemble the art as much as she captures it from all of us.” The snippets are provided out of context for others to read in formats including newspapers, murals, vinyl prints, paintings and social media live-postings.
Artwork Description
An evolution of Gordon’s ongoing Snippets series, in which the artist explores overheard statements, I Want To Turn My Identity Off delves into the complexities of identity, inviting the viewer to make their own interpretation of an at once incredibly bold, yet ambiguous, statement.
Quote about the theme
These paintings remind us of our collective responsibility to foster a sense of unity and understanding amidst our diverse identities.
op.x
Artist
Artist Bio
op.x is a South London guerrilla artist who primarily works with space, words and graphics.
He is committed to making art accessible to all and works predominantly in public spaces to create playful and disruptive spontaneous installations that challenge our relationship with space.
Often integrating humour, op.x’s mischievous spirit injects a much needed dose of levity into the daily grind of life: reminding us all to not take life too seriously.
Artwork Description
With op.x’s characteristic mischievousness and humour, Fragile playfully hacks the St George’s Cross, typically associated with national pride, courage and strength, to highlight underlying political and societal fragility, as well as the need for repair.
Quote about the theme
[This artwork aims to] highlight the underlying political and societal fragility and its need for repair.
Osman Yousefzada
Artist
Artist Bio
Osman Yousefzada is a British-South Asian interdisciplinary artist and writer, engaging with the representation, rupture and reimagining of the migration experience. He works across textile, sculpture, moving image, installation and performance, referring to the socio-political issues of today. Yousefzada’s practice is led by modes of storytelling, merging autobiography with fiction and ritual.
Yousefzada is a research practitioner at the Royal College of Art, London and a visiting fellow at Cambridge University. His work has been shown at notable international institutions including: Whitechapel Gallery; Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (solo 2018); Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Wapping Project, London; Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio; Ringling Museum, Florida; Lahore Museum, Pakistan; Design Museum, London; Lahore Biennale, Pakistan; and Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh.
Artwork Description
With More Immigrants Please Yousefzada seeks to shift the conversation on migration by reappropriating visual language of barricade tape, usually associated with exclusion, and including the symbol of a welcoming rug of Eastern design, to convey a bold message of hospitality.
Quote about the theme
[I aim to] reclaim the conversation around migration
Reena Kallat
Artist
Artist Bio
Reena Saini Kallat was born in Delhi in 1973. Her interest in political and social borders and their fierce cleaving through land, people and nature resonates with the continuing aftershocks of the Partition in India, which her paternal family experienced. She investigates borders, citizenship, maps and archives; re-inscribing these in the collective imagination through large-scale installations, drawing, photography, sculpture and video, concerned with ideas that hold each other in tension-barriers in a world of mobility, porosity in sites of fissure, memorialisation in the aftermath of amnesia, and the promise and illegibility of national legal documents. She uses the paradox of the existence of technology for free flow of information and restriction on movement to suggest that total isolation is not possible.
Kallat’s work has been featured in numerous solo exhibitions including Deep Rivers Run Quiet, Kunstmuseum Thun, Switzerland (2023); Common Ground, Compton Verney, UK (2022); Leaking Lines, Firstsite, UK (2022); Deep Rivers Run Quiet, Norrtalje Konsthall, Sweden (2021); Verso-Recto-Recto-Verso, MNAAG-Musée National des Arts Asiatiques Guimet Museum, Paris (2020); Blind Spots, Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai (2019); Earth Families, Manchester Museum, UK (2017); Woven Chronicle, Vancouver Art Gallery (2015); ZegnArt Public Project, Bhau Daji Lad Museum (2013); Falling Fables, Maximum India, Kennedy Centre (2011).
Artwork Description
In Pattern Recognition, Kallat appropriates the Snellen Eye Chart format, creating visual representations of Henley’s Passport Index, which ranks nations based on travel freedoms granted to their citizens, and drawing attention to the ever-changing, perpetually unequal geopolitics of access and mobility. In the landscape version of Kallat’s piece for The Gallery, charts of 2016 and 2023’s data illustrate the UK’s shifting status.
Quote about the theme
Where there is contact there is exchange and fusion.
Yasmin Nicholas
Artist
Artist Bio
Yasmin Nicholas (b.1994) is a multidisciplinary artist, poet and filmmaker. Nicholas’ work explores experiences of Black womanhood, identity and Caribbean culture through mixed media including poetry, film, photography and painting.
Her Dominican grandparents and the culture of her ancestors are a major influence on her work.
Artwork Description
Does This Answer Your Question? is Nicholas’ powerful response to the interrogation of her identity, presenting the viewer with a portrait of an innocent self, literally torn into to create space for an uncomfortable, confronting and profoundly personal poem.