Appropriating found objects and refashioning them to new aesthetics, Dozie Kanu creates sculptures and photography that are inherently disobedient and stubbornly slippery. They resist classification and exist instead as communicative or performative objects. Kanu’s ongoing investigation into the limits of form, functionality, materiality and usefulness are often filtered through a personal lens drawn from the artist’s lived experiences.

In the artist’s debut solo exhibition at Project Native Informant, Owe Deed, One Deep, 2020, every sculpture remixes and modifies found objects, with the visible rust as a reminder of how readily items are discarded once they are deemed no longer productive. The repurposing of objects deemed useless, the artist honours and reanimates the people whose labour gave them function. In extending the lives of these unwanted items, he perpetuates the existence of those who brought them into being. His memorialisation is a site of collective mourning of which has not yet ceased to exist, acknowledging that the pathways and legacies of the oppressive systems of the past continue to characterize the present.

Born and raised in Houston, Texas to Nigerian immigrant parents, Kanu initially intended to study film directing but shifted his focus to production design for film and theatre, receiving his BFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York, in 2016. Dozie Kanu’s first solo institutional exhibition was at the Studio Museum of Harlem in 2019.

Last year, Kanu opened his second solo exhibition at Project Native Informant, Tinted Spirit. In May 2022, the public sculpture commission On Elbows was shown as part of the Public Art Fund exhibition Black Atlantics. In September 2022, Cordyceps Gaud Adversary opened at Neuer Essener Kunstverein, Essen, Dozie Kanu's first solo European institutional exhibition. 

Artist, writer, musician and performer Juliana Huxtable (b. 1987, Bryan-College Station, Texas) excels in probing dormant and marginalized histories, narratives and technologies to challenge discourses around contemporary perceptions of identity, futurity and politics.

Through painting, photography, text and video, she has defined a singular aesthetics of language that often plays into a digital, Tumblr-ised visual identity, a kind of collaged rap and visual rapture. Huxtable’s practice offers a key critical voice on identity, as well as, specifically, her own identity as a black trans woman. Her work comments on different forms of reality through the lens of her personal structural experience. Inseparable from the political, the personal is our opportunity for disobedience, and Huxtable plays with this concept through her ever-evolving portrait of selfhood.

Huxtable is concerned with the way in which marginalised groups are ‘forced to be their own saints’. Hinged on empathy, desire and agile distortion as a political and social paradigm, Huxtable’s motive re-examines our understanding of ‘the image’ and ‘the human’. Her works pool together references from science fiction, queer nightlife, Internet subcultures, folklore, fetishes and Furry fandom, into portrayals of intersectionality and speculative social archetypes as a method of resistance and liberation.

In 2022, Project Native Informant presented AKIMBO SPITTLE. In the exhibition, Huxtable places her own body at the centre of mythologising scenes; the printed and overpainted canvases set against hallucinogenic landscapes render her figures half human, half animal. 

Huxtable’s recently opened solo exhibition HEADS & TAILS IN THE STRUGGLE FOR ICONICITY presented the artist with the opportunity to broaden the cast of characters populating the canvases. From the exploration of her own image in the previous show, Huxtable here takes the work a step further; an exercise in world building if you will, resulting in a universe of her own creation.

In 2017, Huxtable published Mucus in My Pineal Gland, a celebrated volume of poems, performance scripts and essays. In the same year, MUMOK and Huxtable published Life: A Novel, a collaborative science-fiction narrative with artist Hannah Black. 

Her works and performances have been presented internationally in solo and group exhibitions, including Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève; Hayward Gallery, London; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Brooklyn Museum, New York; ICA, Boston; MoMA PS1, New York and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, amongst others. 

Her work can be found in the collections of Solomon R. Guggenheim, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem and Magasin III Museum for Contemporary Art, Stockholm.

Sophia Al-Maria is a Qatari-American artist, writer, and filmmaker living and working in London. Though her work spans many disciplines including drawing, collage, sculpture and film it is united by a preoccupation with the power of storytelling and myth, and in particular with imagining revisionist histories and alternative futures.

With her friend and collaborator Fatima Al Qadiri, Al-Maria coined the term “Gulf Futurism” to describe the growing atomisation of individuals and the shifting ground of urban planning, aesthetics, and media, and their impact on everyday life in the post-oil Persian Gulf. Her cinematic artist’s videos are fuelled by the combination of critical rigour with an affective charge in their explorations of language, imperialism, and counter-histories – a deep investigation and dramatisation of the sociopolitical, economic, and environmental present.

Al-Maria’s debut exhibition in the United States, at the Whitney Museum of Art, 2016, attends to the Gulf’s embrace of consumerism. Black Friday features primarily of shots of empty shopping centres in Doha. An unseen narrator declares the mall as the place “where the glamorous heart of evil is born”, a place of entrapment and confusion complete with faces blurred beyond recognition and bodies collapsed on the floor. 

Al-Maria was Whitechapel Gallery’s Writer in Residence 2018, resulting in her exhibition BCE comprising of films, performances and readings, including her first collaboration with the artist Sin Wai Kin. Her most recent collection of essays and writings, Sad Sack, was published by Book Works in 2019.

In 2023, Al-Maria presented the trilogy of videos together for the first time in the a solo exhibition, Not My Bag, at the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle. The trilogy of works includes Beast Type Song presented at Tate Britain, 2019; Tender Point Ruin commissioned by LUMA Foundation, Arles in 2021 and concluded with Tiger Strike Red, 2022 which formed the artists solo presentation at the Pavillion of Applied Arts, part of The Milk Of Dreams | 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia.

Sophia Al-Maria recently opened Grey Unpleasant Land, a major collaborative exhibition with Lydia Ourahmane at Spike Island, Bristol.