Artquest: PEER FORUM
Established by Artquest, PEER FORUM is an annual programme aiming to support artists by providing them with the funding, space and resources necessary to establish their own peer mentoring groups. As a host organisation, we provide support and create a space for artists to instigate dialogue and develop ideas and research.
This year’s selected group led by Amrita Dhallu include Kobby Adi, Tamar Clarke-Brown, Priya Jay, Rosa Johan-Uddoh, Hamed Maiye, Seema Mattu, Joy Miessi, Georgia Lucas-Going, Zarina Muhammad, Zeinab Saleh and Ebun Sodipo.
Brought together by curator Amrita Dhallu, the group is concerned with the potential and limitations of possessing a colonised body caught in the system that oppresses it.
Through a range of disciplines, each artist explores embodied experiences of shifting between the physical and spiritual, mobility and entrapment, erasure and hyper visibility. Their works also address how history is constituted and transported within the diasporic body, particularly at moments of migration.
Together they will consider how well-being and creative labour relate to one another through developing a discourse around self-care and healing within their own working practices.
Kobby Adi, Lives and works in London. b.1995.
Tamar Clarke-Brown is a London based artist, writer and curator. Her interdisciplinary practice is focused on experimental futurisms, choreographies, technologies and the black diaspora. Tamar has worked with institutions including Serpentine Galleries and Autograph ABP and presented at the ICA, Tate Galleries, Kadist (Paris), Bard Berlin and more. Tamar contributes to platforms including i-D, Gal-Dem, Protein Journal, AQNB and Screen Shot Magazine.
Amrita Dhallu is a curator working across London and Birmingham. Her work focuses on providing support structures for emerging British artists of Black and Asian descent, through commissioning, creating networks and establishing intergenerational learning spaces. Her current research looks at radically positioning care and wellbeing within formal arts education in order for artists to re-think the pathways of professional development. She currently holds the position of Curatorial Assistant: Commissions at Chisenhale Gallery, London.
Priya Jay is a researcher using curatorial, artistic and herbalist methodologies to develop a practice that is healing and experimental. Her background is in anthropology with a specific focus on digital and decolonial ecologies. With an interest in our collective futures, the central question guiding her practice is how can we be well, in allyship with our bodies, one another and the earth?
She co-runs Patchwork Archivists, formed out of a need to create and hold space for the histories of South Asian diaspora communities. Priya currently works with Barbican and Iniva in London and has previously worked with Autograph ABP, Wellcome Trust and Approved By Pablo.
Rosa-Johan Uddoh is an artist living and working in London. The aim of Rosa’s artistic practice is to reach maximum self-esteem. She does this through making performances, ceramics, fan-fiction, video & sound, exploring spatial agency, collective popular memory, and radical self-love. Uddoh studied BA Architecture at Cambridge University and MA Fine Art Media at Slade School of Fine Art, as a Sarabande: Lee Alexander McQueen Foundation Scholar. She is a Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2018 artist and recently received the Liverpool Biennial Fellowship for 2018-19.
Georgia Lucas-Going studied MFA in Fine Art Media at the Slade School of Fine Art. Recent shows include (NOT) All Personal at the Alexander McQueen Studios, London, UK, Widening the Gaze at Slade School of Fine Art and KNOW WAVE radio show with artist Eddie Peake’s record label HYMN. Lucas-Going was selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2016, and is currently a scholar at the Sarabande Foundation, artist in residence at Wysing Arts Centre with the collective ‘FORMELY KNOWN’ and was selected for Deptford X’s Platform 2018.
Hamed Maiye is a multidisciplinary artist and curator based in London that uses portraiture as a means of expressing emotional identity and heritage. Maiye founded the arts movement ‘Afro-Portraitism’ which documents the multifaceted image of the contemporary youth of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora whilst exploring the concept of self-representation. One of the key drivers in Maiye’s collaborative practice is the introduction of new personal narratives and creating visibility for those who are often marginalised.
Seema Mattu looks at presenting a self-awareness of the ethnic self in a digital space. This othered self is comprised of four key components of minority: race, gender, caste and sexuality. Seema is also the director of Tomboy. TOMBOY is an art initiative which aims to spark minority discourse through video, performance and events. Digital media is used as a convo-filter and TOMBOY recognise the need to platform such practices, in addition to shifting art traffic and conversations from London to non-London spaces within the UK.
Joy Miessi utilises a range of processes to compose pieces that make reference to the duality of everyday life in the UK and her Congolese heritage. Joy has exhibited at Transmission Gallery, 198 Gallery, and at gal-dem’s Friday Late at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Joy has also been a guest speaker at Iniva, Tate Modern and The Courtauld Institute of Art. Previous projects include Project 56: A Celebration of Congolese Culture, Do You Know Your Middle?: a preservation of memories from formative years, and The Gift of a Skort: a series exploring the nuances of gender roles.
Zarina Muhammad is an art critic and artist based in London. She is one half of the White Pube, alongside Gabrielle de la Puente, and they publish a review every week on thewhitepube.com. Cancer sun/Aries moon/Sagittarius ascendant.
Zeinab Saleh is an interdisciplinary artist and curator. Her artwork explores themes of the digital age, iconography, race and politics. Her work has been exhibited in London, Berlin and Canada. Zeinab had a residency at UCL Art Museum in 2018 and was awarded the Prankerd-Jones Memorial prize in the same year.
Ebun Sodipo is a writer and visual artist whose work interrogates and excavates knowledge production, identity construction, the everyday, and online social networks to producing immersive dissonant installations and short videos. They aim to provoke questions about categories and their specific histories; to trouble notions of a ‘natural’ state of being and of knowing; and most importantly to give place to everyday diasporic, marginalised practices as forms of art: as forms of creative living, of lives that constantly offer alternatives to hegemonic ways of being and knowing. Their work finds its impetus in their social positionality/most salient identities: they are queer, non-binary, migrant, African, AMAB, middle class, artist and Black.
