Radical Residency® VII

Sayan Chanda (b. Kolkata) is an artist and textile practitioner living and working in London. Sayan creates hybrid forms that conjure votive offerings, ritual markings and folk iconography using fibres, clay and articles of personal significance. Employing laboured methods of weaving, stitching, dyeing, unpicking found textiles and hand-building, he works intuitively giving physical forms to his anxieties, mythologies, and individual and collective memory. The culminating ambiguous forms allow him to escape into a more comfortable myth.

Amir Dehghan is an Iranian political artist and the son of an ex-political prisoner, growing up alongside him in exile and using the language of art to continue his legacy and represent a censored people, trapped within Iran’s borders. Internally, Amir’s practice defines his identity; it’s an exploration into his culture and an attempt to find out where he stands as a British/Iranian and the son of the tortured. Outwardly, he attempts to introduce a dialogue that focuses on the issues, within Iran, by referencing a culturally familiar gesture from the western perspective beside an artefact highlighting the same gesture that might contrast within Iranian politics/society. Usually taking the physical form of installations, paintings, sculptures, robotics, photographs and sound works – to create an artistic discourse that can directly speak on behalf of the people who can’t talk. He manipulates the trust that comes with neutral contemporary gallery spaces to tell the story of his people unapologetically.

April Dublin-Beeton is born and raised in London to British and Caribbean heritage, April Dublin-Beeton channels her creativity through the intuitive process of painting. To her, painting is problem solving, both physically, through the act of painting itself, and mentally. She prefers working spontaneously on unstretched canvas and cartridge paper in the bulk of her practice, combining elements of drawing and painting, and focusing on colour and paint first and foremost to establish her own personal visual language. She draws inspiration from events and emotions past and present, using painting to process and memorialise the motions of life. 

Olivia Strange’s multi-disciplinary practice spanning sculpture, painting, installation, moving image and poetry, is characterised by a layered narrative and highly visceral aesthetic. The work is concerned with disarming patriarchal descriptors via exploration of her Italian roots and draws on themes of Greco-Roman mythology, the female body & jouissance to portray an empowering image of queer female subjectivity.  

Marcia Teusink is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores climate change, collapsing environments and regrowth through painting, sculpture, video, printmaking and mixed media. Teusink frequently collaborates with other artists, including an ongoing collaboration with London-based Ground Collective.

Diana Zrnic Switches back and forth between the digital and the actual by juxtaposing the two creates a pathway for her to explore the relationship between different types of spaces and different kinds of interaction (the physical and the digital). Through reimagination and digital recycling of the paintings and images, network aesthetics offers the multiplication of possible forms that thought itself might take.