Artists and Collaborators
Asuf Ishaq
Asuf Ishaq’s practice is concerned with themes of migration, embodiment, fragmentation, displacement, and memory. Often presenting the live diasporic body as an evolving archive of memory that transmits experiences. Ishaq explores his own migration and cultural experience to unravel his dual cultural identity. By weaving narratives and archives to reveal new meanings and draw out personal, political and colonial histories and stories. The entanglement of fiction, real, archive and personal narratives, Ishaq deploys moving images, sonic and sculpture. I experiment with multiple genres, and mediums, film, photography, plaster casting, sonic, and installation. Ishaq grew up in Birmingham, he studied in Birmingham, Brighton and London, graduated with MFA Fine Art from Goldsmiths College of Art in 2020,
He was awarded Bow Arts Studio bursary (2020). Ishaq showed his film Mother at Goldsmiths CCA’s online screening for a group show Grounding (2021). He was a recipient of a film production award from Image Behaviour at ICA (2021), which has enabled him to produce new work. Ishaq’s sculptural work Becoming Nature was selected by Bloomberg New Contemporaries (2021), showing at South London Gallery and Firstsite gallery (2021/22). He was selected for a VR Artist Residency at Stryx gallery in Birmingham (2021)
He was awarded Bow Arts Studio bursary (2020). Ishaq showed his film Mother at Goldsmiths CCA’s online screening for a group show Grounding (2021). He was a recipient of a film production award from Image Behaviour at ICA (2021), which has enabled him to produce new work. Ishaq’s sculptural work Becoming Nature was selected by Bloomberg New Contemporaries (2021), showing at South London Gallery and Firstsite gallery (2021/22). He was selected for a VR Artist Residency at Stryx gallery in Birmingham (2021)
Diana Zrnic
Diana Zrnic's practice encompasses figurative painting and sculpture. The juxtaposition of the two creates a pathway for her to explore the relationship between different types of spaces and different kinds of interaction. Through a method of reimagination and recycling of her own imagery, she treats both as a source of infinite potential alternate framings to get a limitless generation of other images from any part of itself. One work informs the next where endless re-enactments and revisions mean thinking things anew. Inspired by the new spatiality of the 21st century, often described as the proliferation of spaces and defined by the hybrid living condition, recent artworks evolved around the idea of simultaneity, displacement, and digital and actual duality.
Diana is interested in looking at the body as a co-processor of all information and in the conception of reality that assumes being implicated in an excessive number of processes at various scales. When exploring the nexus interlinking space, image, and body, she intends for her imagery to deploy experiences of disparate forces to generate a more inclusive continuum and always ask herself; how does the body transform to an extension of the world in which it is situated? Mainly working with paintings and sculptures, her work questions notions of hybridity, simultaneity, and displacements of our lives and world. Through figurative art, she explores how the body transforms into an extension of the world in which it is situated.
Diana completed her postgraduate degree in MFA Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2021 after graduating from the Academy of Fine Art in Zagreb in 2018. Her artworks have been shown in group and solo exhibitions internationally ever since, with the most recent work at Unit 1 Gallery (London), Saatchi Gallery (London), Mestrovic Pavilion (Zagreb), and House of Ebata(Tokyo).
Diana is interested in looking at the body as a co-processor of all information and in the conception of reality that assumes being implicated in an excessive number of processes at various scales. When exploring the nexus interlinking space, image, and body, she intends for her imagery to deploy experiences of disparate forces to generate a more inclusive continuum and always ask herself; how does the body transform to an extension of the world in which it is situated? Mainly working with paintings and sculptures, her work questions notions of hybridity, simultaneity, and displacements of our lives and world. Through figurative art, she explores how the body transforms into an extension of the world in which it is situated.
Diana completed her postgraduate degree in MFA Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2021 after graduating from the Academy of Fine Art in Zagreb in 2018. Her artworks have been shown in group and solo exhibitions internationally ever since, with the most recent work at Unit 1 Gallery (London), Saatchi Gallery (London), Mestrovic Pavilion (Zagreb), and House of Ebata(Tokyo).
Foxy Azucar (FKA Maria Joranko)
Maria Joranko is a London based Latinx/American artist, performer and facilitator who is unapologetic about (re)claiming space. Through her alter performance ego Foxy Azucar, she activates spaces to create experiential moments that serve as sites of power that explore love and the different facets of community through the lens of race, queer culture, gender, nature, and magic. She is specifically interested in examining how healing, transformation, and change can be presented as possibilities within an arts context.
Maria was formerly based in Columbus, OH and while there, she was a member of MINT collective and artist in residence at Cartpushers. Currently she is working towards her MFA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths. She is also Co-President of BlackGold Collective and is in residence through the Goldsmiths CCA Residents program.
She is the 2023 recipient of the Acme Award, Bursary, and Residency. Her work has been shown internationally with her show I know it’s the end & I am full of beauty (2021) at Beeler Gallery at CCAD and #SpeakingThroughMasks (2020) at ABCNoRio in NYC. She also has upcoming shows at Arthouse Wakefield (2023).
Maria was formerly based in Columbus, OH and while there, she was a member of MINT collective and artist in residence at Cartpushers. Currently she is working towards her MFA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths. She is also Co-President of BlackGold Collective and is in residence through the Goldsmiths CCA Residents program.
She is the 2023 recipient of the Acme Award, Bursary, and Residency. Her work has been shown internationally with her show I know it’s the end & I am full of beauty (2021) at Beeler Gallery at CCAD and #SpeakingThroughMasks (2020) at ABCNoRio in NYC. She also has upcoming shows at Arthouse Wakefield (2023).
Katarina Ranković
Katarina Ranković is an artist exploring the interrelationships between character, text and selfhood through performance, video and writing.
Current work explores ways in which 'character' is encoded and run like software — in human personalities, biological organisms and fictional characters. Often concepts like 'freedom' and 'agency' are thought to be opposed to things like 'algorithms' and 'scripts', but the artworks hope to offer a different intuition: that agency can in fact only come into being through scripts — that scripts enable freedom. Katarina writes novels, play scripts and improvises stories in a bid to use text to coax agents of her own.
She has presented her work in a variety of international and national contexts, including Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2021 at Firstsite Gallery (Colchester) and South London Gallery (London); Nottingham Contemporary, Tate Modern (London), and the Museum of Humour and Satire in Gabrovo, Bulgaria. She is also currently in the final stages of a practice-based PhD research project at Goldsmiths College, and teaches at the Glasgow School of Art. As a Serb born in Northern England, raised in Norway and now living in Wales, both the theory and practice of Katarina’s work originates from the daily necessity of inhabiting and switching between many selves.
Current work explores ways in which 'character' is encoded and run like software — in human personalities, biological organisms and fictional characters. Often concepts like 'freedom' and 'agency' are thought to be opposed to things like 'algorithms' and 'scripts', but the artworks hope to offer a different intuition: that agency can in fact only come into being through scripts — that scripts enable freedom. Katarina writes novels, play scripts and improvises stories in a bid to use text to coax agents of her own.
She has presented her work in a variety of international and national contexts, including Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2021 at Firstsite Gallery (Colchester) and South London Gallery (London); Nottingham Contemporary, Tate Modern (London), and the Museum of Humour and Satire in Gabrovo, Bulgaria. She is also currently in the final stages of a practice-based PhD research project at Goldsmiths College, and teaches at the Glasgow School of Art. As a Serb born in Northern England, raised in Norway and now living in Wales, both the theory and practice of Katarina’s work originates from the daily necessity of inhabiting and switching between many selves.
Dr Farhan Samanani
Dr Farhan Samanani
is an anthropologist whose work explores how people connect and build common causes across lines of meaningful difference. He traces how new forms of understanding, community and citizenship emerge when people from diverse backgrounds come together, and looks at how these everyday experiments help us to rethink our democratic systems.
He is the author of How To Live With Each Other: An Anthropologist's Notes for Sharing a Divided World (2022) as well as a co-editor of volumes on the diverse meanings of home, the multiple lives of liberalism, and the politics of care and hospitality. He makes a point of working in partnership with communities and civil societies, and has collaborated with organisations including Citizens UK, The Runnymede Trust, and the World Bank. Farhan's research has been featured by national and international media, including the Guardian, Radio 4 Start The Week, and Intelligence Squared.![]()
He is the author of How To Live With Each Other: An Anthropologist's Notes for Sharing a Divided World (2022) as well as a co-editor of volumes on the diverse meanings of home, the multiple lives of liberalism, and the politics of care and hospitality. He makes a point of working in partnership with communities and civil societies, and has collaborated with organisations including Citizens UK, The Runnymede Trust, and the World Bank. Farhan's research has been featured by national and international media, including the Guardian, Radio 4 Start The Week, and Intelligence Squared.
Sonji Shah
Sonji Shah (they/them) is a mixed-race, trans, non-binary writer, researcher and facilitator. They’re interested in creating space for transforming feelings towards intergenerational healing, and sketching affective ways to reimagine relations into other futures.
They graduated with an MA in Comparative Literature and Criticism from Goldsmiths in 2020 and have since worked as community peer support researcher and facilitator. Their current research focuses on planetarity and speculative fiction. Recent / upcoming publications include a review in BadForm (issue 10) , a tutorial ‘Planetarity tutorial Video’ at Affect and Colonialism Weblab and poems in Transcodiert (issue 2).
They graduated with an MA in Comparative Literature and Criticism from Goldsmiths in 2020 and have since worked as community peer support researcher and facilitator. Their current research focuses on planetarity and speculative fiction. Recent / upcoming publications include a review in BadForm (issue 10) , a tutorial ‘Planetarity tutorial Video’ at Affect and Colonialism Weblab and poems in Transcodiert (issue 2).