Gather, 10th February 2021 3pm–4.30pm
Ticket holders drop in anytime
Subtitled Tour at 3.30pm

SOLD OUT: Join the waiting list here via Eventbrite. If you have booked a space and can no longer make it, please let us know by emailing info@wysingartscentre.org. 

For anyone who has been unable to book a ticket, the tour of the open studios will be livestreamed on our Wysing Broadcasts page here at 3.30pm on 10 February.

Join British Council Net//Work Residency artists Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Uma Breakdown, Nikissi Serumaga and Leyya Mona Tawil for a virtual open studios on Gather, the free social meeting app. 

Using an avatar, you are invited to move through each artist’s room to meet the artists and Wysing staff, view works in progress and to engage with recent research. In Gather, ticket holders can drop in at any time during the session and are welcome to navigate the space in their own time.

For those who would like a more structured visit, you are welcome to join a subtitled tour at 3.30pm led by Chloe Page, Digital Producer and Elizabeth Brown, Assistant Curator at Wysing. We will provide subtitles during the tour using otter.ai. The tour will also be streamed via our Wysing Broadcasts site.

To add your name to the waiting list via Eventbrite, please click here. 

Access information 
The tour at 3.30pm will be subtitled. Unfortunately, it is not possible for us to subtitle other interactions on Gather, but both artists and Wysing staff will be happy to use the chat function for conversations. Simply ask for a conversation over text chat rather than audio, if you prefer.

Please get in touch with us to let us know if there is something you need to be able to participate in this event, by emailing Elizabeth Brown on lizzie.brown@wysingartscentre.org. 

We will endeavor to hold this event in a digital safe space. We ask all visitors to read our Code of Conduct before attending.

Please note that the tour will be recorded for our archive and photographs will be taken throughout the event, however you may disable your camera prior to joining if wished. Throughout the event there will be the option to turn off your audio and camera. We will also give notice before recording or streaming.

About Gather 
Gather is a free social meeting platform accessible through a web browser. It allows users to move through digital spaces freely, join and leave conversations easily, and interact with videos and other content located in the space.

Click here for a PDF with more information about the Open Studios event and how to use Gather.

About the Net//Work Residency
Net//Work is a four-week residency taking place between 18 January to 14 February 2021, developed in partnership with British Council. The residency offers artists a period of reflection, research, practice, skills exchange and professional networking opportunities focused on digital artistic practices and technologies. This year, the residency is taking place online due to COVID-19. 

The online residency aims to find points of connection between four very exciting, but very different practices. The sessions in the residency provide critical support in the form of mentoring, group conversations, problem solving surgeries, guest talks and reading groups. These sessions are used to test ideas, tease out solutions and suggest new possible directions for these artists' projects. Following the residency, artists will have the opportunity to participate in an online exhibition.  

Wysing is working with artists 
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Uma Breakdown, Nikissi Serumaga
and Leyya Mona Tawil with support from David Blandy.

Digital Arts Studios is joining with Golden Thread Gallery and Momentum Berlin to host Rita Adib, Mohamed Abdel Gawad, Tim Shaw and Maya Chowdhry. Artists are taking part in a programme of activities including peer-to-peer exchange, mentoring, group critiques and presentations.

Drawing on his knowledge of digital technology within creative practices, David Blandy, whose practice slips between performance and video, is working with Syrian artist Leyya Mona Tawil and Uganda-based Nikissi Serumaga. Currently living in Oakland, California, Tawil is a performance and installation artist working with voice, movement and interactive audio electronics, whilst Serumaga is interested in stretching the limits of the screen, looking at the conjunction between physical objects, 3D space and ephemeral moments.  

Net//Work’s UK-based artists are Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley and Uma Breakdown. Working with video game, animation, sound and performance, Brathwaite-Shirley uses digital technologies to archive Black and Trans experiences, whilst Breakdown uses parallels drawn from experimental feminist writing practices, the study of horror cinema and game design to reconfigure art as an encounter with unstable and desirable processes. 

British Council in partnership with Wysing Arts Centre and Digital Arts Studios 

Artist Biographies

David Blandy
David Blandy (b. 1976) lives and works in Brighton and London. He studied at Chelsea College of Art and The Slade School of Art. Blandy has established his terrain through a series of investigations into the multiple cultural forces that inform and influence him, ranging from his love of hip hop and soul, to computer and role playing games, geopolitical events and climate cataclysm. His works move between performance, video and installation. 

He has exhibited at venues nationally and worldwide such as Focal Point, Southend, UK; Bloomberg Space, London, UK; Art Tower Mito, Tokyo, Japan; 
Kiasma Contemporary Art Museum, Helsinki, Finland; Tate Modern, London, UK; The Baltic, Gateshead, UK; Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK; Spike Island, Bristol, UK; Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Germany; MoMA PS1, New York, USA, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai, China. He is represented by Seventeen Gallery, London. 

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley 
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley works predominantly in animation, sound, performance and video games to communicate the experiences of being a Black Trans person. Their practice focuses on recording the lives of Black Trans people, intertwining lived experience with fiction to imaginatively retell Trans stories.

Spurred on by a desire to record the “History of Trans people both living and past,” their work can often be seen as a Trans archive where Black Trans people are stored for the future: “Throughout history, Black queer and Trans people have been erased from the archives. Because of this it is necessary not only to archive our existence, but also the many creative narratives we have used and continue to share our experiences.” Danielle’s work has been shown in Science Gallery, Barbican, Tate, Les Urbains as well as being part of the BBZ Alternative Graduate Show at the Copeland Gallery. An online component of their work can often be found here. 

Uma Breakdown 
Uma breakdown is an artist/writer/researcher working around horror studies, feminist literature, and queer RPGs. This year they finished a PhD about The Evil Dead, care, trans* écriture féminine, disaster and play. 

Also in 2020 they presented a plant horror RPG (with Una Hamilton Helle, Eltons Kūns, and Erik Martinson) at Kim?, Riga; a video game about sleeping on the ground next to animals for FACT, Liverpool; and a short story about SSRIs and Artaud for Ma Bibliothèque. They are currently researching criminality as love/writing in Genet and Cixous. 

Leyya Mona Tawil 
Leyya Mona Tawil [Lime Rickey International] is an artist working through dance, sound and hybrid transmissions. Tawil is a Syrian, Palestinian, American engaged in the world as such. Her 24-year record of performance/installation scores that have been presented in cities throughout the US, Europe and the Arab world. Tawil was the 2020 ISSUE Project Room Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow for her NOMADIC SIGNALS program; and a 2018 Saari Residence Fellow (Finland).

Tawil’s solo work - Lime Rickey International’s Future Faith - was nominated for a 2019 Bessie Award in Music. Tawil has received commissioning support from Abrons Arts Center (NYC), KONE Foundation (Helsinki), Pieter Performance Space (Los Angeles), Gibney DiP (NYC) and the Kenneth Rainin Foundation (Oakland). She is the director of Arab.AMP – a platform for experimental live art and music from the SWANA diaspora. 

Nikissi Serumaga 
Nikissi Serumaga is an independent short filmmaker and programme manager at 32° East, an organisation for the creation and exploration of Ugandan contemporary art. In her own artistic practice, she creates bite-sized content that blurs the lines between fiction and documentary. She has made two fiction/documentary hybrid short films exploring the East African coast line (Speak Soon, 2017), and coming of age (Hibo & Hoden). She also participated in the Pictures of Aging Residency led by 32° East.