Sam Williams

Sam Williams (b. 1985, Essex, UK) currently lives and works in London, where he studied MA Sculpture and Moving Image at the Royal College of Art.

Sam has exhibited and screened nationally and internationally at institutions including Estuary 2016: Points of Departure (alongside artists including John Akomfrah and Adam Chodzko, curated by Gareth Evans and Sue Jones) Focal Point Gallery (Southend), ONCA (Brighton), Outpost (Norwich), Baltic39 (Newcastle), Independent Dance, Sadler’s Wells, V&A, Lychee One, Tate Britain and Jerwood Space (London); Fragment Gallery (Moscow) and Korai Project Space (Cyprus).

He was awarded the RCA residency at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris (2015), the Relax Digital Commission (2016) and the Stuart Croft Foundation Award (2017). In 2018 he received an Artist Network Professional Development Bursary to organise a series of choreographic workshops for non-dance artists, and was also artist in residence at ArtHouse (Jersey) and JOYA Arte + Ecología (Almería).

As part of the audio-visual group Emptyset he has performed internationally at institutions including BOZAR (Brussels), Arnolfini, Spike Island (Bristol), La Gaîté Lyrique (Paris) Kunsthalle Zürich and Kraftwerk (Berlin).

For several years prior to her passing, Sam was a close collaborator with the seminal British choreographer Rosemary Butcher MBE. Together they showed work at The Place (London), Nottingham Contemporary and Akademie der Künste (Berlin). Sam is a founding trustee of the Rosemary Butcher Foundation and will work with her extensive archive towards a gallery retrospective.

Image 1: until they feel – ahead of them – a barrier (2016), film still

Image 2, 3: the actual structure is the material (2018) two channel film installation, film still

Image 4: here and not (2017) two channel film installation collaboration with Joe Moran, film still

Jessica Williams

Jessica Williams (b. 1986, US/NO) is an Oslo-based artist who works freely within the realms of publishing, photography, text, and new media. She holds a BFA from the Cooper Union in New York City (2008) and a MFA from the National Academy of Art, Oslo (2014). Her working methods echo those of a hunter gatherer: collecting objects (both physical and metaphysical) that stand in as metaphors for intangible, shared feelings and experiences. The power of language and everyday physicality in the increasingly digital world are constant themes.

Between 2011-2014, she was the driving force behind the small, yet internationally recognized artists' publisher North, South, East, West – NSEW for short. Since 2012, she has regularly given talks and held workshops related to self-publishing and Risograph printing. In 2016, she started producing printed works under the moniker Hverdag Books and in 2018 she co-founded the Norwegian Risograph Society.

Williams' work has been exhibited widely over the past decade, notably at Good Press, Glasgow (solo); KRETS, Malmö (solo); High Tide, Philadelphia (two-person); The New Museum, New York City; Art in General, New York City; Capricious Space, Brooklyn; Open Space, Baltimore, among others. She has also had solo exhibitions in Oslo, Bergen, Barcelona, and Austin, Texas.

Shahrzad Malekian

Shahrzad Malekian (1983/ Iran) is an interdisciplinary artist working with video, performance and sculpture. Malekian’s works often address the human conditions she experiences around her. Her interests include power structures, presentations of gender, the complexity of interpersonal relationships, and shifts that occur in the transition between the private and public domains.

Her works have been shown internationally in group exhibitions in Brazil, USA, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Finland and London. Her video piece was selected for International Film Festival Rotterdam and Göteborg International Film Festival in Jan 2013. She was the finalist for MOP CAP 2015 prize.

Malekian holds a BFA in Sculpture from the Art University of Tehran and is a current MFA Art and Public Space candidate at Kunsthøgskolen I Oslo, Norway. She lives and works in Oslo and Tehran.

Image 1: WARDROBE MEMORIES, Performance, Sommerøya Festival, 2018
Image 2: WARDROBE MEMORIES, Performance, Sommerøya Festival, 2018
Image 3: URBAN EXPERIENCES, Public Intervention, 2015
Image 4: MAKEUP EXPERIMENTS: LIPSTICK, Video Performance, 2013

Ayesha Jordan

Ayesha Jordan is a multidisciplinary performance artist who often uses characters and stories to create indelible moments for cerebral and visceral experiences. Jordan’s characters each represent a facet of herself and act as a tool to playfully disguise herself and to uniquely connect with guests. Much of Jordan's work is about audience engagement, bringing participants as close to the work as possible – creating moments, tasks, and prompts allowing the opportunity to engage with the performer, as well as with fellow audience members.

Some of her previous performance events include Shasta Geaux Pop, Come See My Double D's, Enter & Exit: Playing House, Enter & Exit: Family Reunion, Inter 1-to-1, and In the Tube. Other works include video projects Living Room Dance Breaks, Drunk & Famous, as well as a host of other songs and videos. Jordan has been seen as an actor in the Broadway production of Eclipsed by Danai Gurira and directed by Liesl Tommy, Home by Geoff Sobelle, Failure Sandwich and Ludic Proxy, by Aya Ogawa, Platonov: Or the Disinherited by Jay Scheib, and Stairway to Stardom and Harold I Hate You by Cakeface. She has also been featured in video work and photography by visual artist Carrie Mae Weems. 

Bianca Hisse

Bianca Hisse (b. 1994) is a Brazilian artist based in Tromsø, Norway. Her practice traverses performance and visual arts, exploring dislocations within social systems, collaborative circuits or interdependent arrangements, and often looking on how relational structures can be affected, sustained or destroyed by its own dynamics.

Hisse has presented work at Centro Cultural São Paulo; OC Oswald de Andrade; Casa Líquida (São Paulo, Brasil); Kulta Scenekunsthus; Galleri Snerk (Tromsø, Norway); Frystiklefinn Theater, Iceland; and others. Bianca holds a BA in Body Arts from the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo and is currently taking her MA in Contemporary Art at Kunstakademiet i Tromsø.

Phoebe Davies

Phoebe Davies is a Welsh artist and researcher, presently based at Somerset House Studios in London. Her practice investigates people’s perceptions of their social framing, and she frequently uses collaboration, collective action and Do It Together strategies to make work with individuals, groups and communities.

Through her work Davies often finds herself referencing and exploring collaborative models of working across different social and cultural sectors. Recently, she has investigated ideas taken from areas as disparate as basketball, feminist organisation, science fiction and methods of organic farming.

Recent projects have led  her to work with sex educators, secondary school students, elderly residents in care homes, sports teams and DJs as well as art spaces and institutions, including Tate Britain and Tate Modern (London), Whitechapel Gallery (London), Arnolfini (Bristol), Fierce Festival (Birmingham), South London Gallery (London), Wysing Arts Centre (London), Steirischer Herbst (Graz, AUT), Assembly (Portland, USA) and SA-UK SEASONS 2015 (Johannesburg, ZA).

The final forms of Davies’s work are project dependent, and have included live performances, video, audio, print works and constructed social spaces. She currently co-facilitates three research groups: Bedfellows, a radical sex re-education research project; Synaptic Island, a London-based womxn and non-binary DJ collective; and Art is Action, a UK-based social practice research group. In 2015 she was awarded the British Council’s Social Practice Fellowship for the International Cultural Exchange U.S.Program, and she is currently supported by Syllabus III, an UK-wide alternative peer-led learning programme for artists.

Selected extracts from A Navigation by Phoebe Davies and Nandi Bhebhe, 2017. [Please listen with headphones/speakers, as audio is sensitive]

Marte Dahl

Marte H S Dahl (b. 1989, NO) is an artist based in Oslo. She holds a BFA from the Academy of Fine Art, Oslo (2018).

Her works revolve around themes such as the body, movement, material, feminism, honesty and desperation, mostly taking the form of live performance and video. In working intuitively in front of the camera in a clean space, with a few rules or props, she creates a space in the meeting between the object, space, movement and body, allowing anything to happen.

She explores how one can be drawn to one’s aversions, using her own as inspiration when working with projects. She has exhibited at Sommerøya Music Festival, Rom for Kunst og Arkitektur, Galleri Ramfjord and Akademirommet.

Image 1: uten tittel, 2018, Video installation, during graduation show “Neste Næste Nästa”, Kunsthøgskolen i Oslo. (photo: Istvan Virag)

Image 2: Still from video, uten tittel, 2018

Image 3: Still from video documentation of performance "Recital No. 1", 2017 (photo: Mari Storm-Gran)

Emma Bäcklund

Emma Bäcklund is a Swedish multi-disciplinary artist based in Berlin and London. Working with photography, performance, sculpture and writing she explores the body, its boundaries and consequences of its environment. She investigates social systems, power relations and cognitive impact on the physical body. While questioning preexisting structures, habit and gesture she strives to invent unexplored patterns of form, movement and thinking processes. The physical relationship is essential in her process of making and the photograph as a performative document explore elements of gesture. There are slippages between image, object and subject.

Emma received her MA in Photography from the Royal College of Art (2017) and her BA in Photography from London College of Communication, University of the Arts London (2015). Her upcoming solo exhibition Clench in Leeds (10 - 17 Oct ) explore contradictions in meaning between materials in relation to body, mimicry and power relations.