Steve Argüelles 

is a percussionist, jazz drummer and record producer. A restless experimenter, since the 1980s his diverse musical career has included collaborations with Django Bates, Dudu Pukwana, Mose Allison, Alex Balanescu, Steve Lacy, Lee Konitz, and more recently The Recyclers, Dhaffer Youssef, Omar Sosa, Ambitronix, Benoît Delbecq, DJ Req, Noël Akchoté, and many others. Anglo-Catalan and born in Birmingham, he has long been based in France, producing records and making music for films, theatre and dance. He is the founder of the Plush record label and Bureau de Son.

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Billy Cancel

is a poet-performer and sound-collage artist, based in New York City. His work has been widely published, including two recent and critically acclaimed collections, Psycho'clock and Mock Trough Rasping Crow. His poems have been described as, “a dazzling & jolting pleasure”, and the poet Todd Colby has described him as, “our era’s John Donne, doused with the spittle of Mark E. Smith, while he dances to Captain Beefheart”. With Thursday Fernworthy (Lauds), Billy Cancel makes up the noise/poetry band Tidal Channel.

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Marie Coulon

is founder and director of Betts Project in London. Betts Project was established in London in 2013 to introduce both a specialist audience and wider public to new ways of discovering architecture through the exhibition and promotion of its drawings and sculptures. The gallery’s aim is to support and promote work by established and emerging international architects, as well as lesser known or overlooked practices. The gallery is also driven by the desire to introduce architectural objects as works of art. Between July 2021 and December 2022, Coulon ran the temporary residency and exhibition space Betts 302 in the Unité d’Habitation Le Corbusier in Marseille, France. In 2022, Coulon was awarded an RIBA Honorary Fellowship for contribution to architecture, having “deepened awareness, understanding, and practice of architecture in the UK, through exhibitions celebrating and promoting the work of British and international architects.”

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Chris Paul Daniels

is an artist/filmmaker. He won the 2010 Deutsche Bank Award for his collaborative project with Maria Anastassiou, Unravel, ‘the longest hand painted film in Britain’, producing over 100 interactive public events across the UK, including Tate, BFI Southbank, CCA Glasgow, and installations at Ikon Gallery, Chisenhale Gallery, and the Whitney Museum in New York. Residencies in Kenya and China have resulted in feature length experimental documentaries and Chris has collaborated in film and music projects in China, Iceland, Sweden, and the Netherlands.

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Michelle Williams Gamaker

is a London-based artist working with moving image and performance. She is currently completing a trilogy of short films (The Eternal Return (2019), The Fruit is There to be Eaten (2018) and House of Women (2017) that explores the idea of brown protagonists: recasting individuals of colour to play characters who were once played by white actors. Her source material are 1930s and 40s British and American studio films that are layered with complex colonial and race politics. She utilises the forms of plays and films through scriptwriting to propose new narratives and alternative structures. Michelle is also a Lecturer in BA Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, University of London, Chair of Trustees of Pavilion, a visual arts commissioning organisation in Leeds, and co-founder of the Women of Colour Index (WOCI) Reading Group with Samia Malik and Rehana Zaman.

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David Gothard

is a theatre director and former artistic director of Riverside Studios, where he worked closely with Samuel Beckett, Tadeusz Kantor, Joan Miró, Shuji Tereyama, Andrei Tarkovsky, Kathy Acker, among others. In 2019, Gothard was awarded a CBE for service to cinema and drama.​ He regularly teaches student directors on writing at the National Film School and at Birkbeck in the University of London, and is a guest lecturer at Peak Performances at Montclair State University, for the International Writers Programme at the University of Iowa with the Playwrights Workshop, and Chelsea College of Art and Design. He is a member of the Board of Pristina International Film Festival.

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Roddy Hunter

is an artist, educator and writer. He has taught internationally since the mid-1990s, including at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, and currently at The Glasgow School of Art. His performance art and body-based action art has been seen worldwide, and some of his work is documented in the survey Ice Cream: Contemporary Art in Culture, and his monograph Civil Twilight and Other Social Works. Live experience is central to his practice, but he is increasingly concerned with performance in the context of post-internet globalisation and working in hybrid online/offline spaces. He also researches digital archiving and preservation alongside pre-internet histories of networked art practice. He has published in international journals such as Apparatus, Berlin, Acoustic Space, Riga and Inter: art actuel, Quebec, and he has written monograph essays on artists including Alastair Maclennan, John Newling, and André Stitt.

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Alexandra Kingston-Reese

is a writer and researcher, currently teaching in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York, UK. Until 2016, she taught at the University of Sydney, Australia, where she previously completed her PhD. Her research interests lie in the intermedial relationships between the contemporary novel and visual culture. She has written for ASAP/J, MFS, Mosaic, the Journal of Urban Cultural Studies, and The Conversation. Her first book, Writing Against the Image, considers the work of a range of contemporary novelists, interrogates the 21st-century American novel's negative aesthetic experiences and what it looks like as it embraces visual culture and intermediality.

 

Sara Makari-Aghdam

is a curator, and writer. She contributed to the exhibition Localism at Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art in 2015, and her first major exhibition, Vinyl Icons: Persian Pop and Turkish Psychedelia, was held at Vane Gallery, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne in 2016. Of Azeri-Turk, Persian and English descent, she was born in Stockton-on-Tees, UK and grew up with her father’s tape collection from pre-revolutionary Iran (tapes of songs he liked recorded from the radio when he couldn’t afford to buy records). She studied the history of modern art, design and film at the University of Northumbria, graduating in 2007, then completed her Masters degree in curating and contemporary design at the Design Museum in London, with Kingston University.

 

Catriona McAra

is an art historian and curator. She is Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Aberdeen, having previously worked in curatorial roles across West Yorkshire. Her research interests are in feminist aesthetics and the legacies of surrealism in contemporary cultural practice, as well as the aesthetics of geology and the archaeology of modernism. Her books include: A Surrealist Stratigraphy of Dorothea Tanning’s Chasm (2017) and The Medium of Leonora Carrington (2022).

 

Harold Offeh

is an artist, curator and educator. His work encompasses performance, social practice, live art, video and photography in the context contemporary popular media representations of racial identity and desire, exploring the body, space, race and gender. He was born in Accra, Ghana in 1977, grew up in London, UK, and now lives in Cambridge and works in Leeds and London. He was the 2017 Open House residency artist at Kettle's Yard Gallery in Cambridge and a summer artist-in-residence at Wysing Arts Centre. He has exhibited widely including at Tate Britain; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Val de Marne, France; New Art Exchange in Nottingham; the Museum of African Diaspora, San Francisco; The Studio Museum, Harlem; and at Miami Art Basel, Miami.

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Yuzo Ono

is a haiku poet and writer based in Kawasaki, Japan. He studied at the University of Tokyo (BA) and the Royal College of Art (MRes, fine arts pathway). He won the Modern Haiku Association Award for Criticism in 2002 and the Modern Haiku Association New Talent Award (honorable mention) in 2005. He is the author of several haiku poem books: Mexican Restaurant (Kadokawa Publishing, 2006) and Further Selection of New Haiku 21 (co-author, Yushorin Press, 2010). In the anthology Haiku Poets Born in the Post-war Era (Mainichi Newspaper Publishing, 2012), he was selected as one of 109 leading contemporary haiku poets of Japan. He is a councillor of the Haiku International Association and a member of the British Haiku Society and has a keen interest in the relationship between haiku poetry and fine art, and between Western and Eastern cultures.

 

Jonathan Watkins

is a curator and writer and has been Director of Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, UK since 1999 as well as writing extensively on international contemporary art. Previously he worked in London, as Curator of the Serpentine Gallery (1995-1997) and Director of Chisenhale Gallery (1990-1995). He has curated large international exhibitions including the Biennale of Sydney (1998), Facts of Life: Contemporary Japanese Art (Hayward Gallery, London 2001), Quotidiana (Castello di Rivoli, Turin 1999, Tate Triennial (2003), Shanghai Biennale (2006), Sharjah Biennial (2007), Negotiations (Today Art Museum, Beijing 2010) and the Guangzhou Triennial (2012). He curated the Iraqi Pavilion for the Venice Biennale in 2013 and Floating World, Bahrain in 2017, and was on the curatorial team for Riwaq (Palestinian Biennial 2007). In 2019, he will curate Small Between the Stars, Large Against the Sky, at the Quebec Biennial.

 

Grace Weir

is an artist whose work ranges from film and installation to experimental videos, lecture-performances and web projects. These are concerned with the nature of ideas and the ways in which thinking is materialised, so that the work often refers to the act of its own making and the mediums in which it is made.  She has a particular interest in scientific phenomena and the ways we construct, rationalise and experience time, and her work is informed by conversations and experiments with scientists, philosophers and practitioners from other disciplines. Grace Weir represented Ireland at the 49th International Venice Biennale and has exhibited widely nationally and internationally. She was recently Artist-in-Residence in the School of Physics, Trinity College Dublin, and had a solo exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in 2016.