I am beyond thrilled to share that I have been awarded the BMW 2020 residency.  A panel formed by Maryse Bataillard, Manager of Corporate Communications at BMW France, Nathalie Berriat, Director of GOBELINS, François Cheval, Artistic Director of the Residency, Hervé Digne, Collector, Chantal Nedjib, l’image par l’image, Consultant for the BMW Residency, Sam Stourdzé, Director of Rencontres d’Arles and Christophe Wiesner, Artistic Director of the Paris Photo fair has chosen my work unanimously. 

The residency will take place from September to December 2020 and the award includes: 

• An € 8,000 grant.
• Access to support from experts (especially in the fields of video, motion design, 3D, VR), and from the residency artistic director, François Cheval.
  
• Production of two exhibitions at prestigious venues for the Rencontres d’Arles and Paris
  Photo.
• Publication of a book included in the BMW Art & Culture collection.
• A set of exhibited works.

• An assistant photographer to support me with the production of the work.

• Provision of a workspace.
• Use of shooting studios and school’s equipment. 

I am very glad to share I have received £2.5K from Arts Council England Emergency Response Fund, which allows me to continue to work and relaunch my practice despite having had major cancellations due to COVID-19. 

During these months I have also been running online workshops and taking part in an online art auction run by The Auction Collective. 

This month I am delivering a particiàtory art project funded by the London Community Foundation and PeaBody. 

I have also been interviewed and asked to demonstrate the wet collodion process by BBC Four for a 60-minute episode focusing on the Victorian Era led by Lucy Worsley. 

I was invited by Nunnery Gallery to take part in the London Art Fair 2020.  The works were very well received and  included in the photography highlights tour of the fair run by Diane Symth. Read more about the series on this link. 

During October and November 2019, I have been undertaking a residency at Penumbra Foundation, NY. During the residency period I ran an Open Studio event and delivered a lecture at School of Visual Arts New York by invitation from Lyle Rexer.  On the 27th of November, the London Alternative Photography Collective presented my practice at the Science Museum London for the Art and Science Late event. 

This October I have been undertaking a residency at Lucy Art residency in Kavala, developing an in-depth research on tobacco. This residency has generously been supported by LAR, the I-Portunus programme as well as by the Kavala’s Tobacco Museum.  

The work I did during the residency includes a series of chlorophyll prints using images of worker’s hands in the processes of selecting, controlling and modifying nature to render it profitable, from the archives of Kavala’s Tobacco Museum.

I also worked with a newspaper from the 21st of April of 1967 (the coup d’état day from right-wing army officers in Greece and the beginning of the regime of the colonels) to reflect on the use of farming and nature to advance specific political agendas. The newspaper talks about the new regime and the new subventions farmers had access to. The military junta was initially mainly supported by farmers. I used the cyanotype process which is often seen as naive and organic, when it’s main legacy relates to photography’s early use to study, analyse, and rationalise nature.

During the residency, I visited a tobacco plantation where religious images seemed to be placed to protect the product. Being farming an extremely tough business where one might be at the mercy of outside forces such as market fluctuations or weather, I wasn’t surprised to see them. I decided to do a perfume with Kavala’s tobacco leaves on an edition of 33 bottles of 2ml to reflect on subjective appreciations of value and worth.

Below some images of the final pieces produced as well as of the production process.

I am very pleased to be selected for the Bow Open Show curated by Carey Young. Exhibition runs from September 27 to December 15. 

• Opening Hours: Tue-Sun, 10am-5pm. 
• Private View: Thursday, September 26 at 18:00 
• Public talk: Saturday 28th of September.

 Reed more on this link

This month I am running a cyanotype workshop at the South London Gallery. the workshop will take place at the SLG new Fire Station building which has a fantastic space for workshops.  See more info on this link. 

I am very happy to share that SPAIN arts & culture, the Cultural Office of the Embassy of Spain in USA, will be covering my transport and accommodation expenses while I’ll be in NY benefiting from Penumbra Foundation professional development programme.  Read more about SPAIN arts and culture and Penumbra Foundation by clicking on the links. 

From the 6th of June until the 30th, my work will be on display with Golden Thread Gallery as part of Belfast Photo Festival.  The exhibition includes works by London Alternative Photography collective artist, and goes with a public programme to which I contributed with a chlorophyll printing workshop.  

The works on exhibition were produced in China in November 2018 thanks to a grant from Quad Derby, FORMAT Festival and the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute.  They reflect on my experience as an artist in residency at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in Chongqing, where as a foreigner not speaking Chinese and staying there for just a month, I could only access and understand fractions of the selective realities made available to me. In that context, I built a camera that could only expose 3mm fragments of film. I installed the works in a manner that reflects on the notions of access/barrier and that invites the viewers to visually scan the works as they move left to right, mimicking the way these negatives were exposed.

This series of disrupted landscapes, and sometimes abstract images,  explores the limits of representability of identity within my own art practice. The series approaches non-figurative methods of depicting my (artist in residency) identity as a subject.