Keiken

Keiken are a collaborative practice, co-founded by artists Tanya Cruz, Hana Omori and Isabel Ramos in 2015, who frequently work with multiple collaborators. Based between London and Berlin, they come from mixed diasporic backgrounds (Mexican/Japanese/European/Jewish). They are building a collective shared space of virtual worlds, a Metaverse. Keiken, the Japanese word for experience, create speculative worlds, using moving-image, CGI, gaming software, installation, virtual and augmented reality, programming and performance to merge the physical and digital. Their work simulates new structures and ways of existing, exploring how societal introjection governs the way we feel, think and perceive.
 

Keiken are a winner of the inaugural Chanel Next Prize. They recently became residents at Somerset House, London. Recent selected exhibitions include: 2nd Thailand Biennale, Korat (TH); House of Electronic Arts HEK, Basel (CH); Francisco Carolinum, Linz (AU); 17th Venice Architecture Biennale, Venice (IT); Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Tokyo (JP) (2021); FACT, Liverpool (UK); HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin (DE); Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt (DE); transmediale, Haus der Kulturen der Welt HKW, Berlin (DE) (2020); Institute of Contemporary Arts ICA, London (UK); Jerwood Arts, London (UK) (2019).  

Josèfa Ntjam

Josèfa Ntjam is an artist, performer and writer whose practice combines sculpture, photomontage, film and sound. Gleaning the raw material of her work from the internet and books on natural sciences, Ntjam uses assemblage – of images, words, sounds, and stories – as a method to deconstruct the grand narratives underlying hegemonic discourses on origin, identity and race. Her work weaves multiple narratives drawn from investigations into historical events, scientific functions, or philosophical concepts, to which she confronts references to African mythology, ancestral rituals, religious symbolism and science-fiction. These apparently heterogeneous discourses and iconographies are marshaled together in an effort to re-appropriate History while speculating on not-yet-determined space-times – interstitial worlds where systems of perception and naming of fixed (id)entities no longer operate. From there, Ntjam composes utopian cartographies and ontological fictions in which technological fantasy, intergalactic voyages and hypothetical underwater civilizations become the matrix for a practice of emancipation that promotes the emergence of inclusive, processual and resilient communities.

Josèfa Ntjam was born in 1992 in Metz, France, and currently lives and works in Saint-Étienne, France. She studied in Amiens and Dakar (Cheikh Anta Diop University) and graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure d’Art, Bourges (FR) and the École Nationale Supérieure d’Art, Paris-Cergy (FR). Her work and performances have been shown in international exhibitions, including MEMORIA: récits d’une autre histoire, Frac Nouvelle-Aquitaine MÉCA, Bordeaux, FR (2021); Drift: Art and Dark Matter, residency and exhibition at Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston, Ontario, CA (in collaboration with the Arthur B. McDonald Canadian Astroparticle Physics Research Institute and SNOLAB, 2021); Anticorps, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2020); La Manutention, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2020); Paysages alentour, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2020); Risquons-tout, WIELS, Brussels (2020); Climate Knowledges, MAMA, Rotterdam (2020); 15th Biennale de Lyon, MAC Lyon, Lyon (2019); Feminism, Gender, Resistance – Act 3, Arnolfini, Bristol (2019); and Allegoria, duo Show with Kaeto Sweeney, Hordaland Art Center, Bergen, NO (2019). Upcoming exhibitions include NıCOLETTı, London, UK (solo exhibition, Jun–Jul 2021); Face Value, IMPAKT, Utrecht, NL (group exhibi/on, Sep 2021); EUROPA, Oxalá, three-part group exhibi/on at Mucem, Marseille, FR; Centro Internacional das Artes José de Guimarães, Guimarães, PT; and Africamuseum, Tervuren, BE (2021–22); CAC La Traverse, Alfortville, FR (solo exhibition, 2022); Who Speaks for the Oceans?, Mishkin Gallery, New York, US (group exhibition, Spring 2022); and Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, US (group exhibition, Spring 2022).

Ntjam is a member of Paris-based art & research collective Black(s) to the Future (https://blackstothefuture.com/). 

Ntjam’s work is part of the collection of FRAC Alsace, Selestat, FR; EIB Institute, Luxemburg; and Artothèque de Strasbourg, FR.

Hyphen-Labs

Hyphen-Labs is a London-based design studio co-founded by Carmen Aguilar y Wedge and Ece Tankal which builds robust transmedia experiences by combining new and old ideas, crafts and digital, physical, mediums ranging in scale from small objects and prototypes to large architectural pavilions and installations. Through their creative practice and artistic commissions, they blend architecture, speculative and interactive design, digital arts, fashion, creative writing, and film through new media and emerging technologies.

Zaiba Jabbar

Zaiba Jabbar (HERVISIONS) is a leader in augmented reality and digital art exhibitions online and offline working with clients and institutes that include Tate Modern, Tate Britain, Art Night, LUX, The London College of Fashion, Mira Festival and The Mosaic Room.

She is moving image artist, award-winning director, curator, commissioner and founder of curatorial project Hervisions, an investigation into how people in the margins are using technology to create art outside of traditional formats, making space for themselves through the experience of expanded moving image. Zaiba is interested in the democratisation of art and the new accessibility by how we experience art outside the white cube.