Jay Bernard is a writer and interdisciplinary artist whose work explores issues of queerness, race, and archiving through a critical lens. Their short films, artwork, and literary collections have been exhibited at film festivals and galleries around the UK, and they were the recipient of both the 2020 Sunday Times / University of Warwick Young Writer of the Year award, and the 2017 Ted Hughes Award.
Renèe Helèna Browne is an Irish artist working across film, text, drawing, and spoken word. Their practice is rooted in the biopolitical power of deviant bodies as an alternative strategy to being in the world. They create dense, multi-layered art works that harness storytelling as historical revisionism, angsty fandom, and collaborative world building.
Recent exhibitions include ‘A Strange Eight’, a solo exhibition at Intermedia Gallery, Centre for Contemporary Art Glasgow produced with contributions from Oreet Ashery, Sharlene Bamboat, Aaron Goddard, Mason Leaver-Yap, Tako Taal, Roy Claire Potter, Hamshya Rajkumar, and Aman Sandhu (2022), ‘One Artist One Work: Renee Helena Browne’, with LUX Scotland produced with contributions from Sharlene Bamboat, Hannah Fitz, and Mason Leaver-Yap (2021), ‘Am I an Object, part IV’ with David Dale Gallery at P/////AKT Amsterdam (2021), and the European Media Art Festival No. 34 (2021). Browne was a guest researcher with artist Emma Wolf-Haugh at ATLAS, Skye, (2022) and resident on the Experimental Film and Moving Image Residency at Cove Park (2021). They were 2021-23 resident with Talbot Rice Gallery and shortlisted for the 2023 Margaret Tait Award from LUX Scotland.
Jacqui Duckworth was an independent filmmaker, born in Warrington in 1948. All of Jacqui’s film and photography work arose from an instinctive and original cleverness rather than a traditional academic approach and she made several searching films before the MS diagnosis in her early 30s prevented her from carrying on with her plans for further film projects. These included: An Invitation to Marilyn C, Home Made Melodrama, and A Prayer before Birth, the latter shown on Channel 4 as part of a series exploring the relationship between mind and body.
L.Franklin Gilliam (they/them) believes that, in a broken world, the vision and creativity of artists are critical to transformative systems change. Gilliam’s creative practice is research-based and multidisciplinary. It has taken the form of film/video art, installation, games, and illustrated lectures. Gilliam’s projects explore the interplay between obsolete technology formats and the faulty transmission of historical knowledge and difference. Their projects have been screened and presented at the 1997 Whitney Biennial, the New Museum, Oberhausen Short Film Festival, and featured in Anäis Duplan’s BLACKSPACE: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture (2020). Gilliam’s role-playing game, Lesberation, premiered at New York University Game Center’s No Quarter exhibition in 2015.
Onyeka Igwe is a London-born and based moving image artist and researcher. Her work is aimed at the question: how do we live together? Not to provide a rigid answer as such, but to pull apart the nuances of mutuality, co-existence, and multiplicity. Onyeka’s practice figures sensorial, spatial, and counter-hegemonic ways of knowing as central to that task. For her, the body, archives, and narratives- both oral and textual – act as a mode of inquiry that makes possible the exposition of overlooked histories. Her works have been shown in the UK and internationally at film festivals and galleries. She was awarded the New Cinema Award at Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival 2019, the 2020 Arts Foundation Fellowship Award for Experimental Film, the 2021 Foundwork Artist Prize, and has been nominated for the 2022 Jarman Award and Max Mara Artist Prize for Women.
Rene Matić is a London-based artist and writer whose practice spans across photography, film, and sculpture, converging in a meeting place they describe as “rude(ness)” – an evidencing and honouring of the in-between. Matić draws inspiration from dance and music movements such as Northern Soul, Ska, and 2-Tone as a tool to delve into the complex relationship between West Indian and white working-class culture in Britain, whilst privileging queer/ing intimacies, partnerships, and pleasure as modes of survival.
Christopher McMullan is a Dublin-based artist, who recently graduated from the National College of Art and Design where he was awarded a First Class Honours for his studies in sculpture and critical cultures. Working with such materials as harvested clay or aromas extracted from plants and detritus present in a space, he uses materiality as evidence of existence, to communicate memory and to explore ideas of permanence. Christopher was awarded High Commendations for the NCAD Staff Prize in 2023 and has been shortlisted by the RDS Awards for his graduate work, Perfumer’s Organ, which was a part of the group exhibition, Softening a Room (2023). An article written by John Reily about this work is featured in the Autumn 2023 issue of Irish Arts Review.
Adriana Monti is an Italian-Canadian independent producer, feminist filmmaker, and author. She started her career in Italy in the late 1970s by developing a collaborative and experimental style that allowed the women who were the subjects of her research to take an active and creative role in her films. Monti is the founder of the experimental film school Lanboratorio di Cinematografia – Albedo, where she taught and managed while she was finishing Scuola senza fine in 1983. She also taught film history and film production at the Women’s Free University and at the Film and Television School in Milan. Monti moved to Canada in 1996, where she worked for fifteen years as a reporter and story producer at OMNI Television Rogers Media, and started her own company A&Z Media Ltd.
Francis O’Mahoney is a transgender, Irish-based filmmaker and artist. His films are focused on themes of gender and identity. Francis graduated in 2021 from the National College of Art and Design in the Fine Art Media department. During college Francis completed an artist residency in Digital Art Studios in Belfast where he made his award-winning film Cat vomit. Upon graduation, Francis has gone on to screen Cat vomit and his graduate piece Nettle bush, at First Cut! Youth Film Festival, Gaze Film Festival, Dublin International Film Festival, and Cork International Film Festival.
His main career goal is to direct a feature film from one of his original scripts and he is currently working on building up a body of work.
Alice Rekab’s work reflects on a shifting and expansive understanding of family and personal identity. A range of idiosyncratic references emerges through their sculptures and images, which combine hand-made clay objects, found and reclaimed furniture and ornaments, and digital collages using their family photographs and writing. These disparate items are drawn together through Rekab’s Irish-Sierra Leonean heritage, as a way of re-forging a distinct family portrait. Their work is collaborative and by inviting, hosting, and mentoring other artists Rekab reinforces an attitude of inclusivity and a broad perspective of what it means to be family.
Pearl Sharp’s work focuses on cultural arts, health, and Black Diaspora history including the poetry short Back Inside Herself (1984 and 2009 Re-mix), the semi-animated Picking Tribes (1988), the celebrated The Healing Passage/Voices From The Water (2004) and directing numerous documentaries for the City of Los Angeles’ CH 35. Her films have screened in Norway, China, Britain, the Caribbean, and at FESPACO. Instigating through art and activism she authored the non-fiction books Black Women For Beginners and The Evening News, four volumes of poetry, and in 2021 she released the short poetry video Blood Bank.
Sistren Theatre Collective, which means ‘sisterhood,’ was founded in 1977 in Kingston, Jamaica by working-class women in the social, cultural, and political context of Jamaica’s socialist experiment of the 1970s following the first decade of independence. Since 1977, Sistren has used art as a tool for social change for the discussion and analysis of gender-based violence and to provide solutions through organisational networks. The founding members included Vivette Lewis, Cerene Stephenson, Lana Finikin, Afolashade (then Pauline Crawford), Beverley Hanson, Jasmine Smith, Lorna Burrell Haslam, Beverley Elliot, Jerline Todd, Lillian Foster, May Thompson, Rebecca Knowles, and Barbara Gayle. Assisted by the actor and director Honor Ford-Smith, the Collective was forged through a government initiative to improve employment in Jamaica’s poorest communities. Plays like Downpression Get A Blow (1977), Bellywoman Bangarang (1978), Nana Yah (1980), QPH (1981), and Domestik (1982) along with community drama workshops, presaged the documentary Sweet Sugar Rage in 1985.
Soft Fiction Projects is an initiative run by artists Alessia Cargnelli and Emily McFarland. Based in PS2 Studios in Belfast, Soft Fiction Projects is dedicated to producing digital and printed matter on film and artist moving image culture. The printed project acts as a forum for presenting new collaborations, artworks, research, and writing from invited artists and contributors. Revisiting recent history in moving image practices, Soft Fiction Projects’ research focus is an exploration of underrepresented voices, oppositional histories, and geopolitical narratives underpinned by intersectional feminist perspectives that challenge and reframe dominant hegemonic power structures.
