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Aphra Shemza

Reclaiming the Digital: Art, Wellbeing and Reconnection

Reclaiming the Digital: Art, Wellbeing and Reconnection explores how digital art can act as a tool for reconnection in an increasingly networked yet fragmented world. Introducing Aphra Shemza's practice and drawing on her curatorial experience with Art in Flux, the session reflects on artists whose work engages digital culture through the lens of wellbeing and social change. With a focus on the speaker’s shemza.digital roots project, which invites audiences to reflect on reconnection to oneself, the natural world, community and heritage, the talk asks whether it is possible to reclaim the digital as a force for reflection, care and collective good. The session concludes with an open Q&A discussion.

Aphra Shemza is a UK-based multimedia artist whose practice fuses interactive digital technologies with her South Asian cultural heritage and the abstract legacy of her grandfather, Anwar Jalal Shemza. In 2020 she launched the shemza.digital project. Supported by Arts Council England, the project creates accessible digital artworks, workshops and hybrid exhibitions for the British public, including Shemza Digital: Across Generations held at Wolverhampton Art Gallery in 2022. She has worked with major institutions including Barbican, Tate Britain, Victoria and Albert Museum, National Gallery X, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Turner Contemporary and Ars Electronica Festival. She was Director and Curator of Art in Flux CIC from 2016-2022.

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Vistors at Shemza Digital Across Generations Exhibition at Wolverhampton Art Gallery_2

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"My work explores how objects acquire and transform meaning through their contexts, relationships, and accumulated histories. By treating objects as relational and provisional entities, I examine how systems of classification, value, and authority are continuously negotiated and reconfigured."

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(born 2000, Paris) is an artist trained in photography and video, scenography, and painting at the École des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Royal College of Art in London. His work develops a distinct visual language, using visual tools that unfold rhythmically in space, where installations function like musical scores : fragmented, repeated, and composed through variation.

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Experimental letterpress and Book-Object-Art

Phil Cleaver is an award-winning artist, author and graphic designer whose personality was formed in the labyrinthine city of London, under the influence of (among other things) Punk, the Far East and some of the design industries most prominent and influential leaders. Since 2014 Phil has curated an exhibition annually showcasing collections of his folded books at locations including Winterbourne House and Garden, Birmingham, Austin Texas, USA, Tuanku Fauziah Museum and Art Gallery, Malaysia and in St. James', London. These exhibitions all named Book-Object-Art demonstrate the culmination of years of experimentation, reconstruction and intrigue, challenging the accepted, traditional notion of a book.

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John Timberlake's art work is in several public art collections, including the Imperial War Museum, the West Collection, Pennsylvania, the Barts Royal London NHS Trust, and the University of Greenwich, alongside numerous private collections in the UK and Europe. John was Van Lier Fellow at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program (2001-2002) and received his doctorate from Goldsmiths in 2013. Over the course of the past 35 years, he has exhibited internationally (France, Germany, Hungary, Belgium, New Zealand and the US) and worked in both collaborative and solo projects, including co editing the artists' publication Everything (1994-2002) alongside exhibitions with BANK, sculptors Ron Haselden and Dean Kenning, and the art historian Joy Sleeman. He has also authored two books: Bussard Ramjet, an illustrated fiction published by Artwords/Artis den Bosch in 2009, and Landscape and the Science Fiction Imaginary, published by Intellect / University of Chicago Press in 2018.  Most recently he has been engaged with landscape painting, and in 2024 he was commissioned by Maltings Visual Arts in Berwick upon Tweed, Northumberland, to produce a sequence of works for a solo exhibition for exhibition in 2026.

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Mouth of the Tweed 2 2025 Pencil and graphite on paper, 137cm x 101cm)

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Ergin Çavuşoğlu

Spectrum of In-Betweenness

Ergin Çavuşoğlu’s Spectrum of In-Betweenness explores cultivated spaces as terrains for re-enacting and critiquing historical narratives. His ongoing project, Haus Wittgenstein: The View from Above, takes as its starting point the Viennese townhouse designed by philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein for his sister Margarethe (1926–29). Wittgenstein’s recurring metaphors: boundaries, limits, inside/outside, public/private, hidden/manifest, resonate in the building’s spatial viewpoints and interior sightlines.

Çavuşoğlu often investigates place, non-place, heterotopia, dystopia, and liminality, addressing conditions of cultural production across film, video and sound installations, anamorphic drawings, paintings, and sculptures.

Born in Bulgaria, he co-represented Turkey at the 50th Venice Biennale (2003) and was shortlisted for the Beck’s Futures Prize (2004) and Artes Mundi 4 (2010). His works feature in major collections, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim, New York; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; EMST, Athens; Istanbul Modern; and the Ludwig Collection, Aachen. He lives and works in London.

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YARA + DAVINA

YARA + DAVINA make social practice artwork, creating ambitious public artworks that respond to site, context and audience. They will talk about their unfailingly inventive approach in which they use formats from within popular culture to make works which are accessible and playful. Using formats such as Arrivals and Departures boards, football, tea, to lollipop ladies, they root their works in the everyday, using a lightness of touch and humour to make works that are both poetic and universal. They will talk about a selection of recent and current commissions to illustrate their diverse way of making site specific social practice.

A small selection of organisations they’ve created artworks for include: Yorkshire Sculpture Park, National Trust, Tate Modern and Tate Britain, Dulwich Picture Gallery, Venice Biennale, BAM (New York), Somerset House, Manchester Art Gallery, Baltic, IKON, National Portrait Gallery, Whitechapel Gallery, Delfina Foundation, INIVA, Camden Council, Studio Museum Harlem, The Victoria & Albert, London, ZKM (Germany), HIAP (Helsinki), Kaunus Art Biennial (Lithuania), Modern Art Oxford, The RCA, Arnolfini, National Maritime Museum, and the ICA, Old Diorama Art Center with Camden Council, Policy Lab ( UK Government).

They are working on multiple commissions including National Trust + Lightbox Gallery, UP projects, VOICE, touring ORACLES, 101 Outdoor Arts,

exploring diverse subjects from Grief to Morals to Tattoos! www.yaraanddavina.com

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Arts in Health

This online talk on Contemporary Art and Mental Health invites students to explore how art can reflect and influence our understanding of mental wellbeing. This engaging session looks at how artists use creative expression to challenge stigma, share personal experiences, and foster emotional connection. Whether you're studying health, art, or social sciences, this talk offers fresh insights into how creativity can support mental health and inspire change in communities and care settings.

Dr Nicky Lambert is Associate Professor in Mental Health at Middlesex University, with a background in mental health nursing, her work spans women's health, trauma-informed care, art and co-production in health education.

Image Credit - William Kurelek The Maze, 1952

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From pic to pose, particles and beyond: the evolution of a collaborative fine art practice rooted in the interrogation of photography and the photography image.

Rakesh Mohindra is a visual artist who explores themes of transition, identity and situatedness. His work interrogates the intersection of photography with other media. He lectures in art practice, theory and history, and outside formal education he is active in promoting creative practice through running artist groups and mentoring individuals.

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no lecture this week

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From Encounter to Commitment: Mapping Our Meanings.

Andrea Luka Zimmerman, 2025

To work from life towards and into film necessitates not only sensitivity but rigour, ethics, and a strong sense of play, even obstinacy. My films are an ecology, all is connected, the place is as much a character as a performer, or other life forms might be. The way of making is part of the meaning conjured by the making. I am interested in how certain structures may contribute to a denial of life, and how other forms of expression than the standardised ones allow us to see in different ways, making counter memories.

So, how to be consciously and radically open when making work… Looking at examples from my own films, practice and prompts in process and form, I outline some of the value systems underpinning my work, which is always done in relation.

Andrea Luka Zimmerman (they / them) is a Jarman Award-winning artist and filmmaker whose multi-layered practice explores fragile refusals and counter memories, itinerant lives, human and otherwise, in relation to structural and political injustice.

Andrea films include: Taskafa, Stories of the Street (2013, written and voiced by the late John Berger), Estate, a Reverie(2015), Erase and Forget (2017), Artangel produced Here for Life (2019) and The Wapping Project produced Wayfaring Stranger (2024, featuring Eileen Myles), which have screened widely around the world including at Berlinale, Locarno, IDFA, Istanbul, BAFICI and IFFR festivals, as well as in cinemas, galleries, and community and activist spaces.

Andrea’s films are held in the Arts Council England Collection, Archives and libraries, and are distributed by LUX, Modern Films, Grasshopper Films, Second Run DVD. A 2 disk BluRay, Fugitive Images: Selected Works by Andrea Luka Zimmerman, is released by Second Run.

Andrea co-founded the cultural collectives Fugitive Images and Vision Machine (collaborators on Academy Award® nominated feature documentary 'The Look of Silence').

Andrea is Professor of Possible Film (0.4) at Central Saint Martins, London.

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Mariella Smilas is a London-based artist whose practice explores painting as a space where memory and language meet material. She is currently exploring how traces, textures, and subtle gestures allow meaning to emerge through making.

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Thea Wolf (MA Painting, RCA) is a London-based artist who explores intersectional concepts with the focus on the conversation between the “reality” of her physical work and digital work.

She achieves this through working with acrylic and oil on canvas or aluminium, screen prints, digital processes, and Augmented Reality videos with complex abstract geometrical and organic shapes.