Biographies
Aliansyah Caniago works and lives between Bandung and Banda Aceh, Indonesia, and London, UK. Through site-specific interventions, installations and durational performances, he works directly with communities, entering conflicted areas creatively and trying to repair collectively damaged environments. Identity and landscape, tradition and modernity, are at the core of his works. Through performance, he has explored our close bodily connection with landscape, how we can blend-in or stand out, how we become part of the environment or an extension of it. In 2012-2016, he worked at a lake damaged by industrial waste on the outskirts of Bandung. Working with fisherman, villagers and other artists, he pulled a boat for 25 km from this lake to the city centre for 9 hours to evoke the conditions of the lake to the people who lived in the city and create a dialogue to find solutions.
Aliansyah has presented his works in various events and institutions, including:Reconnect/Recollect, Science Museum, UK (2023); Lumbung, at Wagi Wagi Art Lab Section, Documenta 15, Germany (2022); Ecological Thinking, Loughborough University, UK (2021); Composing Archipelagos, Contemporary Art Tasmania, Australia (2021); Unsettlement, Monash University Museum of Art, Australia (2018); Jiwa, Jakarta Biennale, Indonesia (2017); Rendez-Vous, 14th Lyon Biennale, Institute d’Art Contemporain, France (2017); Europalia-Monsoon Project, Kunstencentrum STUK Leuven, Belgium (2017); Baik Art Residency, Davidson College, USA (2017); Asiatopia, Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, Thailand (2013,2016); Belfast International Performance Art Festival 15, Ulster University, Northern Ireland (2015). He is co-founder of the Bandung artist collective Ruang Gerilya, which provides a platform for experimental works with a focus on artist’s process and research. In 2015, Aliansyah was won the Bandung Contemporary Art Award for the ongoing project in Situ Ciburuy lake in West Java, Indonesia. He is a member of Gerilya Artist Collective in Bandung and MoT+++ Artist Collective in Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam.
alin.caniago@gmail.com
www.aliansyahcaniago.com
@aliansyancaniago
Sirun Chen is an artist from Chengdu, China. Her work responds to the interconnectedness of things. Sirun studies the language of objects not to use just human language but to allow objects to communicate in their own terms. She is interested in presenting a dialogue between body and the environment, through collecting and the poetic deconstruction of sensory symbols - including colour, smell, sound and patterns of everyday materials. Sirun explores her relationships with these materials through techniques in craft, such as natural dyes and ceramics. As a whole, she considers her practice as a dynamic long-term ceremony; materials experienced as direct extensions of her body.
Her latest research, inspired by Chuang Tzu’s storytelling method, is about how to accept the facts that ourselves can (be) disappear(ed). The poem in this journal is about part of her journey towards facing death and accepting how our life is just one part of this universal transformation.
chensirun000@gmail.com
@chen_sirun
Rhiannon Hunter is an artist based in London, UK. Her artistic practice
uses forms of storying through film, text, sound and installation to explore
relationships between people, non-human agents and places that are formed
through networks of encounter, co-existence and contradictions. Hunter engages
'noticing' and collage as methodologies for capturing fleeting interactions,
joy, connectivity and wonder that generate associations across personal scales.
Recent audio and film works include inviting groups to take part in
recreational activities in a defunct commercial premises, working with a
volunteer group engaged in land management in urban municipal parks, and an
immersive soundscape of decomposing waste.
Her work and projects have been commissioned by Art in the Gardens at the Horniman Museum, London (2023), Royal College of Art, South London Gallery, Signal Film and Media (2021), Festival Stoke (2020), Estuary 21 festival, Deptford X festival. Hunter is a recipient of the Florence Trust Residency London (2019) and London Creative Network Space Studios (2019). Hunter is a Junior Fellow for the MA Art & Ecology programme at Goldsmiths. Prior to joining the MA Art & Ecology (2022-2023), she was awarded a Diploma in Higher Education in MFA Fine Art (2022) and a BA Textiles (2009) from Goldsmiths, University of London.
www.rhiannonhunter.com
@hunterhiannon
Her work and projects have been commissioned by Art in the Gardens at the Horniman Museum, London (2023), Royal College of Art, South London Gallery, Signal Film and Media (2021), Festival Stoke (2020), Estuary 21 festival, Deptford X festival. Hunter is a recipient of the Florence Trust Residency London (2019) and London Creative Network Space Studios (2019). Hunter is a Junior Fellow for the MA Art & Ecology programme at Goldsmiths. Prior to joining the MA Art & Ecology (2022-2023), she was awarded a Diploma in Higher Education in MFA Fine Art (2022) and a BA Textiles (2009) from Goldsmiths, University of London.
www.rhiannonhunter.com
@hunterhiannon
Linnea Johnels is an artist based in Umbeje/Umeå, Sweden. In her
research-grounded installations, Linnea Johnels investigates spectral actors to
explore the troubled foundations of western societies. These historical agents
that still hold power allow her to understand and engage archives, stones and
bacteria as critical storytellers. She traces connections, in themes and
motifs, between colonialism and climate collapse via exploitative capitalism
and back to deep time. Desire for goods, knowledge or people, combined with
fears for the unfolding polycrisis, are recurring tensions in her work.
Each project is initiated from a specific encounter or curiosity: cyanobacteria, for example, are both the condition for oxygen in the atmosphere and a growing catastrophe in the warming oceans, or the experience of falling in love near the construction of the Gotthard Base tunnel blasting through the 35-million-year-old Alps. Johnels’ recent project is an inquiry into white knowledge production, natural history museums and taxonomy that began from an encounter with a fish named after her grandfather.
@linneajohnels
Each project is initiated from a specific encounter or curiosity: cyanobacteria, for example, are both the condition for oxygen in the atmosphere and a growing catastrophe in the warming oceans, or the experience of falling in love near the construction of the Gotthard Base tunnel blasting through the 35-million-year-old Alps. Johnels’ recent project is an inquiry into white knowledge production, natural history museums and taxonomy that began from an encounter with a fish named after her grandfather.
@linneajohnels
Jane Lawson is an artist based in Manchester, UK, who has spent the past
eleven years working with fungi to loosen the grip of capitalist realism on our
collective imagination. She also makes diagrams to help her understand the
processes and structures that shape our world and possible pathways to an environmentally
and socially just future. Her work is influenced by the US Radical Mycology
movement and informed by her previous involvement in climate and
anti-consumerist activism and work as a researcher into corporate ethics.
Jane graduated from the University of Salford in 2012 and since then has exhibited nationally and internationally. Recent projects include a poster as part of Jade Montserrat’s commission Tender Order for Precarious Straits, 2021; Being Fungal UK Fungus day event for Heart of Glass, 2023; Detox to Delish, part of A Modest Show, 2022. Jane was part of the ten-strong group that co-curated Manchester Art Gallery’s Climate Justice gallery in 2021-2022, using the Gallery’s collection to highlight narratives around colonialism and extractivism. She has worked for Castlefield Gallery in Manchester since 2012; in her current role as the gallery’s Artist Environmental Lead she has kickstarted SPARK, a network of artists based in the North West of England wanting to intervene in the climate emergency.
janelawson.co.uk
@msjanelawson
Jane graduated from the University of Salford in 2012 and since then has exhibited nationally and internationally. Recent projects include a poster as part of Jade Montserrat’s commission Tender Order for Precarious Straits, 2021; Being Fungal UK Fungus day event for Heart of Glass, 2023; Detox to Delish, part of A Modest Show, 2022. Jane was part of the ten-strong group that co-curated Manchester Art Gallery’s Climate Justice gallery in 2021-2022, using the Gallery’s collection to highlight narratives around colonialism and extractivism. She has worked for Castlefield Gallery in Manchester since 2012; in her current role as the gallery’s Artist Environmental Lead she has kickstarted SPARK, a network of artists based in the North West of England wanting to intervene in the climate emergency.
janelawson.co.uk
@msjanelawson
Sam Metz is an artist based in Hull, UK, who creates work that
engages with the concept of ‘neuroqueering’. They create sculptural
installations that incorporate both film and animation while exploring
body-based responses to ecology. As a neurodivergent artist and curator with
sensory processing differences, Sam creates work in non-verbal ways that begin
and end in movement and embodied interactions without recourse to traditionally
privileged verbal and written forms of communication. Recently they created a
series of work called ‘Porosity’, which looked at embodied sensory
relationships to the Humber Estuary.
Through their work with professionals, Sam aims to create a shift in perception away from negativity around stimming and neurodivergence. For instance, working with trainee medical students to encourage creative activities that support stimming.
Recent awards, projects and exhibitions include: Yorkshire Sculpture International (2022); Drawing as Stimming, Necessity supported research, 2021-23; British Art Network Emerging Curator 2021-2022; nominated recipient of the Henry Moore Foundation Award 2022.
www.sammetz.com
@chippedpale
Through their work with professionals, Sam aims to create a shift in perception away from negativity around stimming and neurodivergence. For instance, working with trainee medical students to encourage creative activities that support stimming.
Recent awards, projects and exhibitions include: Yorkshire Sculpture International (2022); Drawing as Stimming, Necessity supported research, 2021-23; British Art Network Emerging Curator 2021-2022; nominated recipient of the Henry Moore Foundation Award 2022.
www.sammetz.com
@chippedpale
Sohorab
Rabbey is a
multidisciplinary artist and researcher from Bangladesh. Sohorab grew up on the
banks of the Turag River and his visual practice stems from his engagement with
the river community and research into river ecology. Drawing on indigenous
hydroontology and the local wisdom of ancestral knowledge – an act of
remembering, restoring and reclaiming – he finds his form and material,
primarily through installations and sculptures that bleed into other mediums.
In the context of a tidal delta, a fragile mangrove ecosystem in South Asia and
a crucial climatic zone – he sets up para-fictional installations to decode the
relationship between ecological catastrophes and imperial extraction
mechanisms, cultural amnesia in a post-contamination landscape and loss of biodiversity.
He re-examines colonial legislative systems by distorting colonial archives,
legal documents, infrastructures, herbarium images and cartographic maps.
Sohorab addresses the accessibility and scarcity of natural resources as well
as the rituals, ecological care and resistance that agrarian river communities
provide to the ecosystem, advocating for the legal rights of indigenous
peoples.
Sohorab Rabbey joined the MA Art & Ecology as an auditing student through the exchange between the Art Department at Goldsmiths and the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg, Germany.
sohorabrabbey@gmail.com
www.sohorabrabbey.com
@sohorab_rabbey
Sohorab Rabbey joined the MA Art & Ecology as an auditing student through the exchange between the Art Department at Goldsmiths and the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg, Germany.
sohorabrabbey@gmail.com
www.sohorabrabbey.com
@sohorab_rabbey
Tina
Ribarits is
an artist based in Berlin, Germany, who works between the digital and the
analogue, including video installations, large-scale
watercolour / pastel drawings, photographs
and sculptural elements. She investigates
representations
of non-humans, tracing historical origins, cultural footprints and political
impact. By inquiring into acts of looking, Ribarits understands current visual regimes in dominant industrialised
societies as hierarchical acts of capture, exoticism and othering of ‘the
animal’ and ‘the wild’. Ribarits
is interested
in disparate (pop)cultural narratives, for example blockbuster movies, video games and nature documentaries.
Her practice incorporates on-site investigations, including research trips to
biological field stations in tropical rainforests such as the Adolpho Ducke
Forest Reserve in the Brazilian Amazon 2016, La Gamba, Costa Rica, 2018. In the
exhibition space, she tests out how habitual modes of seeing can be challenged,
so as to possibly renegotiate who is watching and who is captured. Ribarits is represented by Galerie Reinthaler in Vienna.
www.tinaribarits.com
@tinaribarits
www.tinaribarits.com
@tinaribarits
Elizabeth Salazar is a Venezulan artist based in London,
UK, who works with textiles, plants and natural dyes. Through ritualistic and
poetic performances, she argues for the legacies, feminine and more-than-human,
that challenge colonialism and its social effects. Elizabeth’s work reconnects to
nature and her South American heritage to highlight the excessive damage of
global resource extraction. Every installation and performance contributes to
the collective imagining of anti-colonial arts of healing and ritual.
Elizabeth’s experimentation centres on the sensuality of dyes making. Looking
at nature and colours anew, observation, contemplation. The acceptance of
fragility, as an aspect imbedded in the characteristics of flora and water.
Displaying her textile works in altar-like assemblages of found objects, she
fosters appreciation for her craft and its inherent ecological benefits.
Salazar weaves folkloric stories of dyes to their historical origins in
nonhuman flora and fauna, and highlights their entanglements with imperial
projects, while giving space to their ecological impacts and forms of resistance.
elizasal83@gmail.com
@elizabeth.salazar.guerra
elizasal83@gmail.com
@elizabeth.salazar.guerra
Ella Wong is a curator and researcher based in Hong
Kong who is interested in the interconnection between urban living organisms. In response to modern alienation from nature,
her earlier works documented seasonal city landscapes through clay, ceramics,
drawings, natural dyeing, printmaking and text. Her works raise political
questions relating to Western scientific categorisation of all forms of life.
Drawing on Daoist philosophy on ‘the myriad things as one body’, her recent
unfired clay sculptures with lichens, moulds and raindrops titled Metamorphosisinvestigate how each species can be understood as one and the same life.
Wong received her BSSc in Sociology from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2016. Between 2018 and 2022, she co-curated community art exhibitions at THE DOOOR arts space by the YMCA of Hong Kong. The exhibition exploring the intimacy of local communities and street trees was funded by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council and the Homes Affairs Department in 2020.
@e11a.wong
Wong received her BSSc in Sociology from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2016. Between 2018 and 2022, she co-curated community art exhibitions at THE DOOOR arts space by the YMCA of Hong Kong. The exhibition exploring the intimacy of local communities and street trees was funded by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council and the Homes Affairs Department in 2020.
@e11a.wong