People
Tamara Al-Mashouk is a London-based Saudi-Palestinian artist and organizer. Through multi- channel video, performance, and architectural installation, her work examines the displacement of people both on an intimate and global scale, and negotiates the relationship between home, identity, trauma, memory, and collective histories. As a socially engaged practitioner, Al-Mashouk investigates the fracture as a site of possibility and expands epigenetics beyond the body into place and matter. Her work addresses the intersections of personal histories, global migratory narratives, and identity. Rooted in anti-racist, de-colonial, and anti-imperialist frameworks she engages with notions of home, belonging, memory, trauma, and healing. The work is positioned in response to Eurocentric, orientalist, and colonial/neo-colonial gazes that seek to control, exoticize, vilify, and oversimplify Arab bodies and stories. Al-Mashouk has exhibited internationally, including at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Yuan Museum, Beijing, Today Is Our Tomorrow festival, Helsinki, and Fábrica de Arte Cubano, Havana. In her curatorial capacity, centring topics of anti-racism, decolonization, and social justice, she has produced a short film and organized cultural programs, gatherings, and dialogues in a range of institutional and independent contexts, such as Arab Women Artists Now, Tate Britain, and public venues in Hackney Wick, London. From 2018 – 2019, Al-Mashouk was a Research Fellow at the Center for Arts, Design, and Social Research, Boston, and in 2019, she received a traveling fellowship from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (SFMA), Tufts University, Boston. In 2021 she received the Stevens Fellowship from Wellesley College from whom she holds a BA in architecture, she has an MFA from SFMA.
Rolina Blok is an interdisciplinary artist of Dutch/Romanian origin based in London. Blok is an MA Fine Art alumna from Central Saint Martins, London, where she undertook a printmaking residency from her graduation in 2016 until 2018. Her work includes multiple disciplines such as printmaking, drawing, painting, sculpture, performance, publication, video and visual effects. She also lectures, curates and has an active collaborative practice. Blok is currently working as Associate Lecturer and Project Space Manager for OPENing at Central Saint Martins as part of the Fine Art Programme, a Print Fellow at The Royal Academy of Arts, London, and the course leader for Advanced Printmaking: Experimenta/on and Development at City Lit, London.
Tessa Boffin (b.1960 – d.1993, London, UK) was a pioneering artist and a key organising figure in the UK’s photography scene, working between the mid-1980s and the early 1990s. Despite a brief oeuvre, Boffin developed a complex body of photographic work that explored gender, sex positivity and societal and political issues referring to AIDS. In staged scenes, Boffin championed lesbian visibility and the actualisation of queer identity through explorations of fantasy. Boffin had a bold, ground-breaking practice at a time of little visual representation and acknowledgement of queer desire. In imaginative discovery, she deconstructed historical heterosexual role models, combining fact and story to reimagine them, deftly weaving historical references, critical theory and wit to propose an alternative space of exploration.
Gavin Butt is Professor of Fine Art at Northumbria University, Newcastle. He writes and makes creative research about visual art, popular music, queer culture and performance. His most recent book is No Machos or Pop Stars: When the Leeds Art Experiment Went Punk (Duke 2022), accompanied by compilation LP The Art School Dance Goes On: Leeds Post-Punk 1977-1984 (Caroline True Records 2023). He is also author of Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World 1948-1963 (Duke 2005) and co-editor of Post-Punk Then and Now (Repeater 2016) and an issue of GLQ on The Queer Commons (2018). He was co-director of creative research project Performance Matters (2009-2013) out of which emerged his first co-directed feature film This Is Not a Dream (2011). He is currently developing a new research project with Prof. Heike Roms (Exeter) on the histories of art education in UK nations and regions.
Donna Chambers is an interdisciplinary scholar who is interested in how people and places are represented in cultural and heritage tourism, the link between heritage and national identities, gender intersectionality (specifically Black feminist approaches), postcolonialism and decolonisation, and critical and innovative approaches to research. Chambers joined Northumbria University in September 2022 and prior to that, was at the University of Sunderland where she established a cross faculty Interdisciplinary Research Network on Race, Class and Ethnicity (RaCE). Chambers is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and an Associate Editor for Annals of Tourism Research. In the past, she has served as a Managing Editor for Leisure Studies and an external member of the Central University Research Ethics Committee of the University of Oxford between 2013-2021. Cambers has published numerous journal articles, books, book chapters and presented at many national and international conferences several as a keynote speaker.
Phyllis Christopher is a photographer whose work documenting LGBTQ+ sexuality and protest in San Francisco has been published widely in anthologies such as Nothing But The Girl: The Blatant Lesbian Image by Susie Bright and Jill Posener (1996), Photo Sex: Fine Art Sexual Photography Comes of Age by David Steinberg (2003), Art & Queer Culture by Catherine Lord and Richard Meyer (2013, 2019). Her recent exhibitions include, On Our Backs: An Archive (The NewBridge Project, Newcastle, 2017) and Still I Rise: Feminisms, Gender, Resistance (Nottingham Contemporary, De La Warr Pavilion and Arnolfini, Bristol, 2019). She is a 2020 finalist of Queer| Art’s Robert Giard Grant for Emerging LGBTQ+ Photographers. In 2021, she presented a major retrospective of her work at the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, and Grand Union, Birmingham. Her book published 2022, Dark Room: San Francisco Sex and Protest, 1988-2003 is available through Book Works.
Dr Julie Crawshaw is Associate Professor in the Department of Arts at Northumbria University where she is Head of Subject for Art Practice and Conservation. After graduating from BA Fine Art (Drawing and Painting) from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art (1993), she went on to work with artists and arts organisations in a range of producing roles before undertaking a postgraduate in Development Studies and PhD in Planning and Landscape (both from the University of Manchester). Informed by her multi-disciplinary journey and prior professional experience, her ethnographic research traces practice(s), both in the sense of occupational art work, and artwork, and how they meld. Her work has made contributions to art and urban and rural studies and has specifically introduced art practice and notions of artistic research to planning studies. She is author of Art Worlding: Planning Relations (2022). Her in-development projects are concerned with the barriers that financial practice(s) pose to the useful museum; leadership-as-practice; and dialogues between organisation studies and aesthetics.
Charles Danby is an artist, critical art writer and independent curator. He is currently writing about the inter-sensory and multi-sensory dynamics within the dematerialising spaces of contemporary painting practice. He has held curatorial positions at Vestfossen Kunstlaboratorium in Norway where he curated a partial-survey exhibition of contemporary British Art in 2010, and at Siobhan Davies Studios in London where he curated a site and off-site based exhibitions programme for the dance choreographer from 2009-12. He has held editorial positions at Tate Galleries where he edited the Tate Tanks Programme Notes in 2012 and the Tate Seasonal Guide in 2009, and for the London based art magazine Miser & Now where he was the assistant editor from 2009-11.
Yasmeen Audisho Ghrawi /‘jes.mɪən/ /’aʊdiʃəʊ/ /’ʁrɑː.wiː/ is a queer Iraqi/Syrian/Assyrian performer and story-maker who works across theatre, film, and audio exploring themes of migration, displacement, and social justice using the body as the birthplace of stories. She has collaborated with artists and ensembles in the UK and internationally including WHEN FARAH CRIES by Syrian playwright Mudhar Al-Hajj (Schaubude, Berlin), the satire WELCOME TO THE UK (Bunker Theatre; The Cockpit; Home, Manchester), the Royal Shakespeare Company’s A MUSEUM IN BAGHDAD, STRATEGY OF RUPTURE (Legal Aliens Theatre), CRIMEA 5 AM ( The Kiln Theatre, Dash Arts) and THE WALL ( Al Abadia, Madrid; The Tobacco Factory, Bristol). Between 2021-2022 she worked as consultant to director Ken Loach on his film THE OLD OAK. Yasmeen Audisho Ghrawi is also a stand-up comedian and a member of Counterpoints Arts’ NO DIRECTION HOME comedy collective. Through physical theatre, poetry, and comedy Yasmeen is continually exploring spaces of impossible meetings, the birth of new myth, and the power of our collective imagination to dream up and birth more just worlds. She is currently touring her one-person show From The Daughter Of A Dictator.
Liz Greene is a researcher, teacher, video essayist, and filmmaker. They are an editor of Music, Sound, and the Moving Image (Liverpool University Press) and the co-edited book The Palgrave Handbook of Sound Design and Music in Screen Media: Integrated Soundtracks (2016). They publish research in written and videographic forms. Greene is currently completing a feature length social documentary film that stemmed from the research project Brews and Brows: Shaping Stories from Eyebrows to Scousebrows and is embarking on a new research project on The Wizard of Oz universe.
Sunil Gupta is a British/Canadian citizen, (b. New Delhi 1953) MA (RCA) PhD (Westminster) who lives in London and has been involved with independent photography as a critical practice for many years focusing on race, migration, and queer issues. A retrospective was shown at The Photographers’ Gallery, London (2020/21) and The Image Center, Toronto. He is a Professorial Fellow at UCA, Farnham. His latest book is We Were Here: Sexuality, Photography, and Cultural Difference, Selected Writings by Sunil Gupta, Aperture New York 2022. His work is in many private and public collections including the Tokyo Museum of Photography, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Royal Ontario Museum, Tate, Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art. His work is represented by Hales Gallery (New York, London), Materià Gallery (Rome), Stephen Bulger Gallery (Toronto) and Vadehra Art Gallery (New Delhi).
Dr Rachel Hann is a cultural scenographer and current AHRC Fellow who researches more- than-human cultures of performance design, climate crisis, and trans performance. She is also a Chair of the Theatre and Performance Research Association (TaPRA). Beyond Scenography (Routledge, 2019) is Hann’s first monograph and was shortlisted for the Prague Quadrennial 2019 Best Publication Prize. It provides the first theory of scenographics as the place orientating traits of staged material cultures: from gardening to visual merchandising, installation art to theatre. Hann has also published chapters & peer-reviewed articles on subjects such as costume politics, heritage visualization, practice research, & the performativity of architecture. In 2023, Hann was awarded an AHRC Fellowship for the project Trans Performance Now: Glitching cisgenderism. This 2-year study will centre on investigations of trans and nonbinary approaches to performance making, as well as the cultural standpoint of transness more generally. Hann’s work on trans performance to date spans arguments for atmospherics as nonbinary stage aesthetics and gender-assemblages to analyse the more- than-human practices of gendering. The overall objective of this ongoing enquiry is to platform the vitality of trans and nonbinary experiences in understanding the impact of cisgenderism on artists, audiences, and academics.
Lina Hermsdorf is a multidisciplinary artist based in London working with moving image, performance, and installation. She studied Theatre at the University of Gießen and Visual Art at Frankfurt’s Städelschule with Prof. Peter Fischli. Oyen mediated through the format of a lecture, her scripts use biographical elements that are collectively developed alongside her performers, responding to site-specific contexts. Dealing with questions of authorship and the fragility of the self, her pieces focus on the body in its presence and absence and negotiate the dynamics between the viewer and the work.
Allan Hughes is an artist, and Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Northumbria University. In 2010 he completed his PhD, Screening The Voice: synchronisation, authority & objet petit a, at the University of Ulster under Professors Willie Doherty and Kerstin Mey. He is currently Programme Leader for the BA Hons Fine Art. He is a member of the Curatorial and Collaborative Practices research group and is engaged in collaborative art practice with Blue Mountain Arcturus and NEUSCHLOSS.
Incursions is a collaborative art, walking, and research project based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne by Archie Smith and Kitty McKay. Incursions attempt to disrupt dominant neoliberal narratives of space and place to co-author new ‘counter-narratives’ for our built environment through psychogeography, social engagement, art making, participatory research, cooking and archiving. Incursions’ group walks form part of a broader project that utilises radio and sound production, filmmaking and writing as both research and practice methods.
Joe Keys studied at New College Durham, UK, in Visual Arts, graduating with an FDA in 2017. In 2018, he began studies in Reykjavík at the Iceland University of the Arts, graduating in 2021, and since then, supervises the print workshop at the same institution. He has exhibited frequently in Iceland and has been an artist in residence and exhibitor in Greece, Finland, Estonia, Oman and the UK. He predominantly works with found material through sculpture and printmaking. His works address systems of organisation in daily life with dry humour and consideration for overlooked and under-appreciated objects. Recently, Keys has focused on poetic text works, drawing and collage. He is a board member of the Living Art Museum and co-founded Associate Gallery, an artist-run space in Reykjavík.
Naiza Khan is a visual artist who works with drawing, archival material, painting and film. Her current research interests include archives of weather history, the monsoon and its relationship to empire, memory and histories of migration. Recent exhibitions include Sharjah Biennial 15: Thinking Historically in the Present; 14th Gwangju Biennale: Soft and Weak like Water, (2023), Lahore Biennale 02, Between the Sun and the Moon (2020). In 2019, Khan represented Pakistan at the 58th Venice Biennale with the solo project, Manora Field Notes. She received the distinguished Prince Claus Award from The Netherlands (2013) in recognition of her initiatives in the field of art and culture in Pakistan. Khan trained at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, and completed her MA at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths College, London 2020. She works between London and Karachi.
Dr Claire Ogah, based in Newcastle, describes herself as an emerging digital artist/illustrator /storyteller. She is an entrepreneur and has developed her own creative practice Overlay Couture where she displays and sells her Afrocentric digital art and bespoke jewellery. According to Ogah “my art tells the story of my existence between two major cultural spaces that have resonated with me and positively impacted me within the multicultural space that I thrive and flourish in. I am passionate about inspiring women. I am an advocate for women’s rights. My interests are largely around the fusion of Black African and European culture and identity.’ Ogah is also a key supporter of Teakisi, which is a unique and award winning community resource that creates programmes that deliver impact primarily at the intersection of gender and race inequality. She is a well-known speaker in the city on issues around women’s rights and artistic practices.
Dr Susanna Paasonen is professor of Media Studies. After finishing her PhD in Media Studies in Turku in 2002 she acted as lecturer in Media Culture at University of Tampere (2003), as Academy of Finland postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Women’s Studies in Turku (2004- 5), as senior research associate in Digital Culture at University of Jyväskylä (2005-7), as researcher at the Collegium for Advanced Studies at University of Helsinki (2007-10) and as professor of Digital Culture at Jyväskylä (2010-11) before starting in her current post in August 2011. Paasonen was appointed docent in Media Culture at University of Tampere in 2004 and in Feminist Media Studies in Turku in 2006. She was the first recipient of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters’ Jutikkala Award in Humanities in 2011 and was awarded the Association of Internet Researchers’ Nancy Baym Annual Book Award in 2020. She spent part of her sabbatical research leave in 2016 as visiting scholar at MIT’s department of Comparative Media Studies and at Microsoft Research New England’s Social Media Collective, was briefly visiting professor at University of Florence during the COVID-19 spring of 2020, and was a Hunt-Simes Visiting Chair in Sexuality Studies at SSSHARC/ University of Sydney in 2022.
Janette Parris is an artist who investigates the contemporary urban experience, using narrative, humour and popular formats including soap opera, stand-up comedy, musical theatre, pop mu-sic, cartoons, comics and animation. Parris has exhibited widely nationally and internationally for 25 years at spaces including TATE, The New Art Gallery Walsall, ICA, Kunsthaus Zürich, Hay-ward Gallery Touring, Art on the Underground and Royal Academy of Arts. Parris was one of six lead contemporary artists selected for Museums at Night 2014, whose work could be seen in the site-specific exhibition Everyday Heroes at the Southbank Centre in 2020 and on Southend High Street, for the Focal Point Gallery’s annual Bridge Commission in 2021. In 2022 Parris was one of 46 artists to be selected for the London Open at the Whitechapel Gallery and her text series Bite Yer Tongue was included in the exhibition Emplotment at Ludwig Museum Budapest. In 2023 Parris exhibited in and co-curated Life Is More Important Than Art That’s Why Art Is Important at the Whitechapel Gallery with Gilane Tawadros and exhibited in the group exhibition Poor Things at The Fruitmarket Gallery. Parris is the founder of Arch, an established comic exhibited in the British Library’s Comics Unmasked in 2014. Parris’ Artist Book ‘This Is Not a Memoir’ will be published by Montez Press in November 2023
Charan Singh PhD (Royal College of Art, London). His involvement with community activism around HIV/AIDS informs his research-based practice which uses photography, video, and text to explore his pre-English language life in India to create artistic resistance through storytelling and fictional fragments to express multi-layered gender experiences and the ephemeral nature of queer desire. His work reclaims subaltern queer identities, sub-cultures that are often defined mainly as victims. His video work, They Called it Love, But was it Love? commissioned by Visual Aids (New York) 2020 was selected for New Contemporaries 2023. His project Arrival commissioned by Fierce for the Commonwealth Gales, Birmingham, 2022, was also seen at the Vadehra Art Gallery, Delhi and will be seen in the forthcoming The World that Belongs to Us, New Art Gallery, Walsall. His work, Dissent and Desire, has been seen at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kochi 2018, the Contemporary Art Museum Houston, (catalogue) 2018, and SepiaEye Gallery, New York 2017. He was awarded a Magnum/Photo London Award 2016, a Fire Island Artist’s Residency, New York 2017. His portrait series Kothis, Hijras, Giriyas and Others was featured in the Photoworks Annual (UK) in 2017.
Andrea Phillips is BALTIC Professor and Director of BxNU Research Institute, Northumbria University & BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art. Andrea lectures and writes about the economic and social construction of public value within contemporary art, the manipula/on of forms of participation and the potential of forms of political, architectural, and social reorganisation within artistic and curatorial culture. Her current research project, conducted with artist Jason E Bowman, involves asocial and aesthetic re-reading of the British community arts movement from the mid-1970s to the present.
Abdullah Qureshi is a multidisciplinary artist, curator, and educator. Rooted in traditions of abstraction, he incorporates gestural, poetic, and hybrid methodologies to address autobiography, trauma, and sexuality through painting, filmmaking, and immersive events. Qureshi’s work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Rossi & Rossi, London, Berlinische Galerie, Berlin, Twelve Gates Arts, Philadelphia, and SOMArts Cultural Center, San Francisco. He has formerly held positions at British Council Pakistan, National College of Arts, Lahore, and the Pakistan Institute of Fashion Design, Lahore. In 2017, Qureshi received the Art and International Cooperation fellowship at Zurich University of the Arts and, in 2018, a research fellowship at the Center for Arts, Design, and Social Research, Boston. In 2019, he joined the Centre for Feminist Research, York University, Toronto, as a visiting graduate student. Qureshi is a Doctoral Candidate at Aalto University, Espoo, and a Lecturer in Fine Art at Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne.
Sepideh Rahaa is an Iranian born multidisciplinary artist and researcher based in Helsinki, Finland. She investigates and questions prevailing power structures, social norms, and conventions while focusing on womanhood, storytelling, and everyday resistances. Rahaa aims to initiate and create spaces for dialogue, influenced by feminist politics, decolonial and postcolonial theories and practices as well as social and environmental justice. Currently she is pursuing her doctoral studies in Contemporary Art at Aalto University. Her work has been exhibited in Europe, East and Southwest Asia: Iran, Taiwan, United Kingdom, Spain, France, Norway, Sweden, Estonia, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania and Finland, including venues such as Rauma Art Museum for the Rauma Triennale 2022, Artsi Art Museum 2021 and Pori Art Museum 2019. Recently she exhibited at Liverpool Biennial (2023), Helsinki Biennial (2023). This year she will have exhibitions at Kiasma Contemporary Art Museum and Lahti Art Museum MALVA in Finland. Rahaa is an active member and co-founder of Third Space collective in Helsinki (2015-).
Stuart Linden Rhodes is a retired Senior Lecturer from Leeds Beckett University. He established the Instagram account @Linden_Archives online during the lockdowns of 2020-21, scanning and digitising hundreds of photographs—primarily to preserve his reportage photography for All Points North and Gay Times magazines. These images had been unseen for thirty years. The archive has gained a substantial following, including articles in the Guardian newspaper, numerous magazine interviews and exhibitions at The Grundy Gallery, Blackpool and Herbert Gallery, Coventry. The archive is an affectionate look back on the brash, thriving gay scene of the 1990s. An era in which the pink pound and LGBTQ+ clubbing came to prominence. The first edition of his photo book Out & About with Linden: A Queer Archive of the North was a selected study of the pub and club scene from Birmingham to Newcastle, with contributions from luminaries such as Boy George, Julian Clary, Mel B, Paul O’Grady, Su Pollard and more. Initially published by film-maker Joe Ingham in 2022—and sold out in a print run of 500 within six months—PARIAH PRESS published the second edition of the work in 2022 in a more formalised, archival style whilst retaining the dynamism and excitement of the original.
Cecilia Stenbom is an artist filmmaker, originally from Sweden. Her works span from narrative fiction and hybrid documentary, to experimental, artists’ film and moving image art. Her practice interrogates the moving image and its relationship to the real world – how the moving image permeates reality and, in turn, how the everyday is transformed into narrative fiction. Her films are often set in media saturated, consumer driven everyday environments – within public, institutional and domestic structures – thematically exploring how these structures affect notions of identity and belonging, and, in turn, conditions behaviour and interaction.
Deborah Stratman makes films and artworks that investigate power, control, and belief, considering how places, ideas, and society are intertwined. Recent projects have addressed freedom, surveillance, sinkholes, comets, raptors, orthoptera, levitation, exodus, mineral evolution, sisterhood, and faith. She has exhibited internationally at venues including MoMA (NY), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Hammer Museum (LA), Witte de With (Rotterdam), PS1 (NY), Tabakalera (San Sebastian), Austrian Film Museum (Vienna), Yerba Buena Center (SF), MCA (Chicago), Whitney Biennial (NY) and has done site-specific projects with venues including the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Temporary Services, Hallwalls, Mercer Union and Ballroom Marfa. Stratman’s films have been featured widely at festivals and conferences including Sundance, Viennale, Berlinale, CPH:DOX, Oberhausen, Yamagata, True/False, TIFF, Locarno, Rotterdam, the Flaherty and Docs Kingdom. She is the recipient of Fulbright, Guggenheim and USA Collins Fellowships, an Alpert Award, Sundance Art of Nonfiction Award and grants from Creative Capital, Graham Foundation, Harpo Foundation and Wexner Center for the Arts.
Dr Reem Refaat Talhouk is Assistant Professor in Design at Northumbria and the Head of the Global Development Futures Interdisciplinary Research theme. Reem is also a founding member of MARGINALITIES. Her research interests lie at the intersection of design, innovation, and global development. She questions the interplay between technological designs, humanitarian innovation processes and practices, public health, and community resilience in contexts of marginalisation. Talhouk has been working with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent, TraidCraft Exchange, Global Innovation Gathering, and academics at the American University of Beirut to embark on an exploration of how humanitarian innovation can be done in a socially just manner and in support of socially just outcomes. Additionally, she draws from decolonial theory, intersectional feminism, design justice and social justice when working with displaced communities to innovate in how design is conducted as well as to create new mediums for interaction that increase refugee agency and capabilities. In doing so, her research aims to challenge existing marginal ways of being.