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Artist in Residence

The Centre for Law and the Humanities hosts an Artist in Residence, to provide alternative artistic representations of the political and social issues our research highlights. This collaborative approach allows us to produce a series of thought-provoking events for students, staff and the general public.

CURRENT ARTIST IN RESIDENCE: Maria Lalou

  • Lalou is a conceptual artist and an experimental filmmaker exploring the topic of viewing, incorporating cinematic apparatus and surveillance as part of her tools. Lately, Lalou is re-thinking the viewers' position questioning the mediation of data controlled by algorithms today. She has published two monographs, [theatro] (2015) and the camera (2019). She is a candidate for Doctorate of Philosophy at CREAM University of Westminster, London, attempting an argumentation for the use of the camera medium as a tool of resistance and its politics of viewing towards the freedom of the subject. Lalou holds a BSc in Product Design and Architecture from Technical Institute of Athens and BFA in Fine Arts from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam.
  • Received research grants from the Royal Academy of the Arts (former Denmarks Designskole) in Copenhagen, in 'theatre' from the DasArts in Amsterdam and has been awarded with practise grants from the Danish Arts Foundation, J.F. Costopoulos Foundation(GR), Mondriaan Foundation and Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst (NL). Nominated for the Fulbright Artist Grant twice, Lalou is a Fulbright Scholar as of 2018. She has collaborated with Roehampton University as a contributor (London) on activate post academic journal and with MIT Press on the Leonardo Journal. She has been a lecturer at Princeton University, ETH-Zurich, Aalto University-Helsinki, at IUAV of Venice, Rijksacademie Studios and the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam amongst others.
  • Lalou is the creator of the work [UN]FINISHED together with the Danish architect Skafte Aymo-Boot, an ongoing research in Athens on concrete skeleton buildings, publishing her third monograph [UN]FINISHED (2023). In 2020 Lalou and Aymo-Boot co-founded 'cross section archive' in Athens, a space for Art & Architecture investigating urban phenomena.
  • For more information see Lalou's website and the research website: cross section archive.

PREVIOUS ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE

  • 2021-22 Miranda Pennell: Working primarily with the moving image, Miranda Pennell  uses photographs sourced from archives as a starting point for reflecting on Britain's colonial legacies. Her current research explores aerial photography and 'policing' of the Middle East and North Africa, during the so-called interwar years. The research asks how an artist can re-present images that have been produced under circumstances of radical inequality, without simply reproducing the violent erasures implicit to colonial ways of seeing. Given the pervasive disavowal and expedient 'forgetting' associated with official histories in Britain, the research strives to find ways of framing materials to overcome blind-spots and to cut through habits of seeing/not-seeing. She is currently experimenting with audio-visual strategies that incorporate familiar, popular tropes from European science fiction and horror to de-familiarise and suspend what we think we already know about the zone we call 'the past'. This approach threatens to amplify the poetics of the reconnaissance photograph, with the aim – not of mystifying or erasing violent facts – but of making their often obscured, violent reality more readable and tangible. Pennell's first training was in contemporary dance, and her early-career video work focused on dance, performance and choreography in the everyday. This work has been broadcast on terrestrial TV in eight countries. Pennell was awarded an MA in visual anthropology from Goldsmiths College, University of London in 2010. She undertook practice-led doctoral research at the Centre for Research in Education in Arts and Media (CREAM) at University of Westminster, for which she received an AHRC scholarship. In 2016, she was awarded a PhD; her thesis is titled 'Film as an archive for colonial photographs: activating the past in the present'. She has taught on the intersection of dance, performance and video at the London Contemporary Dance School, at the Laban Institute, and internationally and has been a visiting lecturer at various UK institutions. Several works are currently available for streaming via the documentary film platform Doc Alliance Films (DAFilms.com). Pennell has received funding from Arts Council England, Film London's Artists Moving Image Network, BBC and Channel 4.
  • 2020-21 Manu Luksch: Through her films and art works, Manu Luksch researches the effects of emerging technologies on daily life, social relations, urban space and political structures. Her current focus is on corporate-governmental relationships and the social effects of predictive analytics in the algorithmic city. Her work is included in the Collection de Centre Pompidou, the BFI National Archive and the Core Collection at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. Her awards include: Globale Perspektiven Award 2020, ZONTA Award – 65th Kurzfilmfest Oberhausen 2019, Open Media Award 2019, Best Feature – Moscow International Documentary Film Festival 2016, Elevate Artivism Award 2015 and the M. v. Willemer Prize by Ars Electronica Centre and City of Linz. Manu is a Resident Artist at Somerset House and a founding member of ambientTV.NET (Ambient Information Systems), a long-time collaboration with Mukul Patel. She was formerly Open Society Fellow 2018 and visiting Fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London. In 2021 Artist in Residence Manu Luksch released a film, ‘Sing and Cry, Cry and Sing’, as part of the Alternative Human Rights Expo, organised in response to Expo 2020 Dubai. The film focuses on the true story of the imprisonment of Polish fitness celebrity Artur Ligeska in the UAE. Artur was arrested on false charges and found himself in an isolation cell of a maximum-security prison.  Artur tells his story, and explains how the support of his neighbouring inmate, the prominent Emirati prisoner of conscience, Ahmed Mansoor, helped him to maintain hope and survive his nightmare. A trailer/excerpt of the film is available to view online.
  • 2019-20 Bryonn Bain: Bryonn Bain is Brooklyn’s own hip hop theatre innovator, spoken word poetry champion, prison activist, actor, author and educator. Celebrated as 'poet laureate of the hip hop generation' by NAACP President Benjamin Jealous, Bryonn is an Associate Professor at UCLA, currently working to develop their Prison Education Program. He has appeared in discussion with some of contemporary culture's biggest names on BET’s award-winning talk show My Two Cents, authored three books and lectured and performed at over 100 colleges and correctional facilities in the USA, Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe. His one-man multimedia production, Lyrics From Lockdown, tells the story of Bain’s wrongful imprisonment through hip hop theatre, spoken word poetry, calypso and classical music has received extraordinary reviews and sold out in 3 continents.
  • 2018-19 Margareta Kern: Margareta Kern's work is concerned with the politics of making visible forms of power and authority that are felt, but not always easy to articulate or even to perceive.  Her current work investigates the performative and mimetic strategies of digital capital, asking if, in an era of 'fake news' that has destabilised conventions of 'fact' and 'fiction', what role is left for art? What kind of images and approaches do we need to cultivate, to counter reactionary and rightwing imaginaries generated by post-truth politics?
  • 2017-18 Tings Chak: Tings Chak is a Hong Kong-born and Toronto-raised activist and artist, who holds a Master of Architecture from the University of Toronto. Her work draws inspiration from, and contributes to, the migrant justice and internationalist working-class-struggles she is, and has been, part of. Her graphic novel, Undocumented: The Architecture of Migrant Detention (2017), explores the role of architecture in the control of migrant bodies and the politics of visual representation. She is currently based between Johannesburg and São Paulo, contributing to popular political education projects and crafting designs towards a socialist future. 
  • 2016-17 Zuleikha Chaudhari: Zuleikha Chaudhari is a theatre director and lighting designer based in Delhi and Mumbai. Her works shift between theatre and installation, as investigations into landscapes that are neither real nor imagined and at the centre engage with the role of the viewer in the performative experience. Chaudhari is interested in the framework of law as performance, the role of performance in law and the performativity of legal-truth production. Chaudhari’s works have been shown in performance festivals, galleries and exhibitions in United States, Germany, France, Belgium, Vienna, South Africa, South Korea, China, Japan, The Netherlands, Pakistan and India. She was awarded the Sangeeta Natak Academy’s Yuva Puruskar in 2007 and the Charles Wallace India Trust Award in 2001.
  • 2014-16 Lisa Dwan: Lisa Dwan is a celebrated Irish actor who, before her residency at Birkbeck's Law School, gained critical and box office acclaim for her performance of Samuel Beckett's Not I. Lisa’s project involved helping Law staff lead a project on law and theatre, an initiative proposed by the Centre for Law and the Humanities. 
  • 2013 Yvette Vanson: Yvette was appointed as the first Artist in Residence and as an Honorary Research Fellow at the Law School in 2013. An exhibition of her work was shown at the Peltz Gallery in November and her films were shown and discussed throughout the autumn term. Yvette used a 'studio' at 16 Gower Street for painting, with an open-door policy for students and staff to visit and discuss her work on an informal basis. Yvette was also invited by the Centre for the Law and the Humanities to exhibit some paintings in March 2013 during the Annual Conference of the International Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities.