The following practice researchers were selected to take part in a 15-month residency programme running from January 2023 to March 2024 generating insights and understanding of the ways in which the Transforming Collections research can enable new stories to be told.
The four artists' research engaged with several UK museum collections sharing experimental creative approaches to questions of what and how museums collect and care, how artists and objects come to be ‘known’ (or ‘forgotten’), and the possibilities for interactive machine learning in sounding out archives, amplifying architectures and re-imagining kinship.
The artists will showcase their final residency artworks with a display at Tate Modern South Tank from 02-06 October 2024 as part of the Museum x Machine x Me public programme.
Evan Ifekoya
Evan Ifekoya is an interdisciplinary artist working in community organising, installation, performance, sound, text and video, whose practice is led by Spirit. They view art as a site where resources can be both redistributed and renegotiated, while challenging the implicit rules and hierarchies of public and social space. Through archival and sonic investigations, they speculate on blackness in abundance. Strategies of space-holding through architectural interventions, ritual, sonic installations and workshops enable them to make a practice of living in order not to turn to despair.
They established the collectively run and QTIBPOC (queer, trans*, intersex, Black and people of colour) led Black Obsidian Sound System (B.O.S.S.) in 2018. They were awarded the Paul Hamlyn Foundation bursary in 2021, the Kleinwort Hambros Emerging Artist Prize in 2019 and the Arts Foundation Award for Live Art sponsored by the Yoma Sasburg Estate in 2017.
Christina Peake
Christina Peake is a British Bajan collaborative practice-based doctoral researcher with the University of Westminster and The National Archives, whose research practice explores historic narratives of climate colonialism and extractivism in the Caribbean and how these can inform ecological and cultural interventions today. Peake blends research within collections, communities and environments, using immersive methodologies to inform the storytelling of complex speculative worlds, inclusive of their histories and futures.
Erika Tan
Erika Tan’s practice has evolved from an interest in received narratives, contested heritage, subjugated voices and the transnational movements of ideas, people and things. Her work arises out of processes of research and responses to the unravelling of facts, fictions and encounters related to events, locations, audiences and specifics that may already exist.
Tan has exhibited internationally including in ESOK Jakarta Biennale (Stovia Museum); Frequencies of Tradition (Times Museum Guangdong); the Diaspora Pavilion (Venice Biennale); Artist and Empire (Tate Touring/National Gallery Singapore); Come Cannibalise Us, Why Don’t You (NUS Museum, Singapore); There is No Road (LABoral, Gijón); Thermocline of Art (ZKM, Karlsruhe); Around the World in Eighty Days (South London Gallery/ICA, London); Belief (2006) and Natasha (2022), Singapore Biennale; Cities on the Move (Hayward Gallery, London); He Xiang Ning Museum, Shenzhen.
Tan leads the MA Fine Art at Central Saint Martin’s, is a Reader of Contemporary Art Practice and a Decolonising Arts Education Fellow with the Decolonising Arts Institute, University of the Arts, London. She is also currently a research member of Circumambulating Objects: On Paradigms of Restitution of Southeast Asian Art (CO-OP), SOAS, London.
Yu-Chen Wang
London-based Taiwanese-British artist Yu-Chen Wang’s work asks fundamental questions about human identity at a key point in history when ecosystems and technosystems have become inextricably intertwined. She has a long-standing interest in the entangled relationship between land, history and identity. Many of her projects have been developed through undertaking residencies, conducting field research, developing cross-cultural and disciplinary collaborations, creating site-responsive exhibitions, and engaging with the public. All of these are vital processes for developing her artistic practice: mapping, navigating and connecting.
Her work is informed by the history of places, collective memories, individuals’ stories and relationships established with different localities and communities: from Manchester’s textile and railway industries, Birmingham’s canal networks, Liverpool’s observation and maritime navigation, CERN’s particle physics research, South Yorkshire’s peat extraction and coal mining, to East Anglia’s agriculture and ongoing peatland conservation and, most recently, Taiwan’s mangrove forests.
Wang has exhibited widely, including most recently at the Drawing Biennial (London, 2024), Le lieu unique (Nantes, 2022), MoCA Taipei (2020), Kumu Art Museum, (Tallinn, 2020), and Science Gallery Dublin (2020).
