Selectors

Hew Locke is a sculptor whose fusing of historic sources with current political or cultural concerns, and the merging of influences from The Caribbean and London, lead to richly textured, vibrant pieces that stand on a crossroad of histories, cultures and media. His work is on the collections of The Tate Gallery, The Metropolitan Museum in New York, The British Museum and the Government Art Collection, amongst others. His public artworks include ‘The Jurors’ memorial at Runnymede marking 800 years of Magna Carta. His recent solo exhibition at Ikon Gallery in Birmingham‘Here’s the Thing’ is now touring in the USA.

Michelle Williams Gamaker works with moving image, performance and installation. Her practice is often in dialogue with film history, particularly Hollywood and British studio films. By restaging scenes to reveal their politically problematic, imperialist roots; her work is a form of fictional activism to recast characters originally played bywhite actors with people of colour. She combines scriptwriting, workshopping with actors, revisiting analogue SFX and producing props to create intricately staged films. Williams Gamaker is shortlisted for the Film London Jarman Award 2020 and is also recipient of the Stuart Croft Moving Image Award 2020 for
The Bang Straws (2021).

Tai Shani's multidisciplinary practice, comprising performance, film, photography and installation, revolves around experimental narrative texts. Shani creates violent, erotic and fantastical images told in a dense, floral language which re-imagines female otherness as a perfect totality, set in a world complete with cosmologies, myth and histories that negate patriarchal narratives. These alternate between familiar stylistic tropes and structures and theoretical prose in order to explore the construction of subjectivity, excess and the affects of the epic as the ground for a post-patriarchal realism.

Tai Shani is an artist living and working in London. She is the joint 2019 Turner Prize winner together with Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Helen Cammock and Oscar Murillo. In 2019 Tai was a Max Mara prize nominee. Her work has been shown at Turner Contemporary, UK (2019); Grazer Kunst Verein, Austria (2019); Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Italy (2019); Glasgow International, UK (2018); Wysing Arts Centre, UK (2017); Serpentine Galleries, London (2016); Tate, London (2016); Yvonne Lambert Gallery, Berlin (2016) and Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2016).