Many of us at the Ruskin will already have had the pleasure of working with Onyeka, and others might know Jesse from the wider art world:

Onyeka Igwe is a London born and based, moving-image artist and researcher. Her work is aimed at the question: how do we live together? Not to provide a rigid answer as such, but to pull apart the nuances of mutuality, co-existence and multiplicity. Onyeka’s practice figures sensorial, spatial and counter-hegemonic ways of knowing as central to that task. For her, the body, archives and narratives, both oral and textual, act as a mode of enquiry that makes possible the exposition of overlooked histories. She has had solo/duo shows recently at MoMA PS1, New York (2023), High Line, New York (2022), Mercer Union, Toronto (2021), and Jerwood Arts, London (2019). Her films have screened in numerous group shows and film festivals worldwide. This year, she participates in the group show ‘Nigeria Imaginary’ in the national pavilion of Nigeria at the 60th Venice Biennale and has solo shows at Bonington Gallery, Nottingham, Arcadia Missa, London and Peer Gallery, London. She was awarded the New Cinema Award at Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival 2019, 2020 Arts Foundation Fellowship, 2021 Foundwork Artist Prize and has been nominated for the 2022 Jarman Award and Max Mara Artist Prize for Women. 

Jesse Darling is an artist who writes, lives, and works. His research is concerned with the attempt to make visible the unconscious of European petro-colonial modernity through the history of technology and the production of ideology, or the objects and ideas with which we make up the world. In sculpture and installation he has taken up this enquiry using something like a materialist poetics to explore and reimagine the worldmaking values of that modernity. He is also interested in the role of spirituality as a structuring matrix for secular social life, and his practice takes seriously the idea that intuition, dreams, pathologies and folklore all have something important to tell us about the world. If there is a formal theme that runs through his work it is the acknowledgement of fallibility and fungibility as fundamental qualities in living beings, societies and technologies, which extends to the “mortal” quality of empires and ideas as a form of precarious optimism - nothing and no-one is too big to fail. Taking vulnerability and entanglement as a fact of life lends itself to a politics and a practice of community and coalition: Darling has been part of countless community-led projects and organizations and continues to research ways of being-with as praxis. Correspondence and dialogue form an important part of his research process. You can write to him here .

He has published many texts online and in print, including two chapbooks: VIRGINS, published by Monitor Books (2021), and SHOWGIRLS (Arcadia_Missa publishing, 2023, on the occasion of a Tate film commission for Site Visit). Selected solo exhibitions include Enclosures at Camden Arts Center (2022), No Medals No Ribbons at Modern Art Oxford (2022), Gravity Road at Kunstverein Freiburg (2022), Crevé at Triangle France Astérides (2019), and The Ballad of Saint Jerome at Tate Britain (2018—2019). Darling also participated in the 58th Venice Biennale, and was awarded the Turner Prize in 2023.