PRESS RELEASE from UAL: Decolonising Arts Institute
Twelve emerging and mid-career artists with an extensive range of practices have been selected as the second cohort of 20/20: a national commissioning and network programme directly investing in the careers of a new generation of ethnically minoritised and diverse artists.
20/20 was launched in November 2021 by UAL Decolonising Arts Institute, working in partnership with 20 UK public collections, museums and galleries, and supported by funding from Freelands Foundation, Arts Council England’s National Lottery Project Grants Programme and UAL.
The project was conceived in response to urgent calls for action within arts and culture in the wake of Black Lives Matter, as social inequities and racial injustices continued to be amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The selected artists work across a diverse range of media, traversing painting, print, photography, filmmaking, animation, drawing, ceramics and sculpture. They will undertake 15-month paid residencies hosted by partner museums, galleries and art collections, and participate in a peer support network, to develop their artistic practice. Each residency will lead to the production of a commissioned artwork that will enter the partner’s permanent collection.
The first cohort of 8 artists was announced in September 2021, and their residencies are currently underway, pairing a total of 20 artists with 20 UK collections and resulting in 20 new permanent acquisitions over the life of the project.
Professor susan pui san lok, 20/20 Project Director and Director of the Decolonising Arts Institute said, “We are thrilled to welcome the second cohort of artists to 20/20. This is an exciting phase in the 20/20 project – our first eight residencies are already in full swing, and it’s been wonderful to support the deepening development of ideas and relationships. We are looking forward to starting journeys with our second cohort of artists, as they delve into collections and help to generate richer understandings of the histories and contributions of overlooked objects and artists in their midst.”
The artists & their collection partners
Jessica Ashman & Bristol Museum and Art Gallery
Jessica Ashman is a London-based artist working in animation, music, performance, and installation. A graduate of the Royal College of Art in Animation, Ashman combines textured animation with film projection, painting, and soundscapes, creating abstract narratives that explore her Jamaican diasporic heritage, Black radical feminist theory and science fiction.
Instagram: @Jessica_a_ashman
Cora Seghal Cuthbert & The Herbert Art Gallery and Museum
Cora Sehgal Cuthbert’s work explores the connections between the personal, the cultural, and a universal spirituality/humanity. Through this, Cora aims to expand her own worldview, as well as her audiences’, to encourage the sharing of stories, and to encourage the recognition of the beauty and love within our own everyday lives.
Instagram: @coracuthbert
Sonya Dyer & The Box
Sonya Dyer is an artist and writer from London and is a Somerset House Studios Resident. Dyer’s practice explores where the centre is located within fictional narratives of the future. She was a finalist for the Arts Foundation Futures Award 2021 and is an alum of the Whitney Museum of American Art: Independent Study Program.
Instagram: @mssonyadyer
Billy Dosanjh & Wolverhampton Art Gallery
Billy Dosanjh produces art that revels in diaspora worlds. It comes from a place of connection with the storytellers of cultures from elsewhere. Inspired by Smethwick, his hometown, and the surrounding Black Country, Billy’s practice stays rooted in what many locals argue is the centre of the modern world.
Instagram: @billster187
Adham Faramawy & Kettle's Yard
Adham Faramawy works across media including moving image, sculptural installation, print, painting and wall-based works, engaging concerns with materiality, touch, and toxic embodiment to question ideas of the natural in relation to marginalised communities.
Instagram: @adham_faramawy
Holly Graham & Manchester Art Gallery
Holly Graham is a London-based artist whose work looks at ways in which memory and narrative shape collective histories. Holly is an Associate Lecturer at the Royal College of Art, and Co-Founder of Cypher BILLBOARD, London.
Instagram: @hollycagraham
Curtis Holder & Leeds Art Gallery
Curtis Holder is a London-based artist who works primarily in coloured pencil to create large-scale portraits and figurative works on paper. In 2020, Holder won Sky Arts Portrait Artist of the Year and his work is held in the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Soho House and the National Theatre, where he became the first ever artist in residence in 2022.
Instagram: @curtisartist
Sarah Maple & Bradford Museums and Galleries
Sarah Maple is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist known for bold artworks that challenge notions of identity, religion and feminism. Much of Maple's inspiration originates from her mixed religious and cultural upbringing as a British-Punjabi. She graduated with a BA in Fine Art from Kingston University and has exhibited her work internationally.
Instagram: @sarahmapleart
Karen McLean & Walker Art Gallery
Karen McLean is a British Trinidadian artist. She is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work merges historical narrative, memories, material, and mythology to question the role of the artefact, encouraging audiences to create new interpretations. Her practice asks the public to face the ongoing, and layered, colonialist traumas and their legacies.
Instagram: @karenmclean_art
Christopher Samuel & Birmingham Museums Trust
Christopher Samuel is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice is rooted in identity and disability politics, often echoing the many facets of his own lived experience. Seeking to interrogate his personal understanding of identity as a disabled person impacted by inequality and marginalisation, Christopher responds with urgency, humour, and poetic subversiveness within his work. This approach makes his work accessible to a wider audience, allowing others to identify and relate to a wider spectrum of human experience.
Instagram: @christophersamuel_
Zoë Tumika & Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art
Zoë Zo, Zoë Tumika & Zoë Guthrie is an artist from Glasgow, Scotland. They work predominantly with clay and make ceramics using hand-building techniques as well as wheel throwing. They also make using lettering, drawing and video. Zoë interrogates Scotland’s colonial history, specifically relating to and the legacies of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Informed by the politics Black Radicalism, they employ narrative-building and dismantling, listening and questioning, to consider alternative understandings and activate further possibilities as a means to liberation.
Instagram: @ztumika
Bindi Vora & Ulster Museum, National Museums, NI
Bindi Vora is a British-Indian photographic artist, associate lecturer in photography at UAL London College of Communication, and Curator at Autograph, London. Bindi is interested in how ideas of resistance and resilience are influenced by our everyday surroundings often using collage, linguistics, analogue processes, and found photography within her practice. In 2023 she launched her first major publication, Mountain of Salt, published by Perimeter Books.
Instagram: @bindi_vora
Notes to Editors
For more information or to speak to project spokespeople, please contact:
Katie Moss, Communications Executive, UAL: k.moss@arts.ac.uk
UAL Communications Team: press.office@arts.ac.uk
Website: www.arts.ac.uk/ual-decolonising-arts-institute/projects/2020
Twitter: @ual | Instagram: @unioftheartslondon #2020Project
Decolonising Arts Institute on YouTube
About The Decolonising Arts Institute
The Decolonising Arts Institute at University of the Arts London (UAL) seeks to challenge colonial and imperial legacies and drive social, cultural and institutional change, through creative interdisciplinary collaborations and research-driven projects and partnerships. The Institute pilot phase (2019-21) saw a programme of seminars, roundtables and residencies, that has led to the launch of 2 significant and complementary 3-year projects that will run in parallel.
20/20 is the Institute’s first major public-facing creative commissioning programme that engages with artists, public collections and audiences at scale, generously supported by Freelands Foundation and Arts Council England. A concurrent major AHRC research project, Transforming Collections: Reimagining Art, Nation and Heritage will combine decolonial feminist approaches to art history, museology and machine learning development, to address biases and barriers within and between collections.
The Institute is led by artist, writer and academic, Dr susan pui san lok, who was appointed UAL Professor in Contemporary Art and Director of the Decolonising Arts Institute in 2019. Prior to joining UAL, susan was Associate Professor in Fine Art at Middlesex University, and Co-Investigator on the AHRC-funded project, Black Artists in Modernism (2015-18), led by UAL in partnership with Middlesex. susan’s practice ranges across moving image, installation, sound, performance, and text. Recent and forthcoming projects include Rewinding Internationalism, Van Abbemuseum (opening November 2022), and the solo exhibitions/commissions, Centenary, Becontree Forever centenary programme, Create London (2022), REWIND/REPLAY, Netwerk Aalst (2022); seven x seven, Glasgow International Festival (2021); A COVEN A GROVE A STAND, Firstsite, Colchester (2019); and Diaspora Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale (2017). Recent writing includes texts in special issues of Art History (2020, 2021); Oxford Art Journal (2021); The Place is Here (2019); and Contesting British Chinese Culture (2018).
About UAL
University of the Arts London (UAL) offers an extensive range of courses in art, design, fashion, communication and performing arts. Our graduates go on to work in and shape the creative industries worldwide. UAL is ranked second in the world for Art and Design in the 2022 QS World University Rankings by Subject ®. The University has a world-class reputation and is made up of 6 equally renowned Colleges and 4 institutes: Camberwell College of Arts, Central Saint Martins, Chelsea College of Arts, London College of Communication, London College of Fashion, Wimbledon College of Arts, UAL Creative Computing Institute, UAL Social Design Institute, UAL Decolonising Arts Institute and UAL Fashion, Textiles and Technology Institute. arts.ac.uk
About Freelands Foundation
Freelands Foundation works to broaden access to art education and the visual arts across the UK. We work with teachers and educators to develop diverse and ambitious approaches to art education. We support artists and arts organisations across the breadth of the UK to develop and present original ideas and practices. We commission research that explores the value that art and culture bring to society.
Our initiatives include a unique programme of residencies, workshops, films and resources for art teachers and educators; the annual Freelands Award championing mid-career women artists; and the Freelands Artist Programme supporting emerging artists in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. We fund art organisations across the UK to expand their work within their communities. Our London project space in Chalk Farm houses workshops, discussions, exhibitions, films, residencies and an extensive library, which explore new approaches to teaching, learning and making art. www.freelandsfoundation.co.uk/
About Arts Council England
Arts Council England is the national development agency for creativity and culture. We have set out our strategic vision in Let’s Create that by 2030 we want England to be a country in which the creativity of each of us is valued and given the chance to flourish and where everyone of us has access to a remarkable range of high-quality cultural experiences. We invest public money from Government and The National Lottery to help support the sector and to deliver this vision. www.artscouncil.org.uk.
Following the Covid-19 crisis, the Arts Council developed a £160 million Emergency Response Package, with nearly 90% coming from the National Lottery, for organisations and individuals needing support. We are also one of the bodies responsible for administering the Government’s unprecedented Culture Recovery Fund. Find out more at www.artscouncil.org.uk/covid19.