Guest Artists & Visiting Practitioners

*This is a growing archive of guest artists and practitioners
that have lead various projects or activities at OSE. As such, not all guests are currently represented.


Lead Artist
Associates Programme, 2023-24

the vacuum cleaner is the name of a UK based artist and activist who makes candid, provocative and playful work. the vacuum cleaner wants to find better ways to go mad. Drawing on his own experience of mental health disability, he works with groups including young people, health professionals and vulnerable adults to challenge how mental health is understood, treated and experienced.

With roots in activism and radical art, the vacuum cleaner has created one-man interventions and large-scale actions as well as performance, installation and film. His work has been shown in galleries, theatres, hospitals and schools and has appeared on streets and in public spaces internationally.

Recent commissions and project partners include: Manchester International Festival, Chisenhale Gallery, Wellcome Collection, National Gallery of Indonesia, Festspiele/Gessnerallee (Zurich).

Whilst a lead artist at OSE, the vacuum cleaner developed It’s My Life, Don’t You Forget.

Guest Artist
Despacito Art School, February 2024

Samara Scott‘s expansive practice is rooted in a deep research and inquiry into the malleability and mutative nature of materials belonging to contemporary production and waste. Whether its clammy neon-decayed club debris or the prickled effervescence of energy drinks; in these mingling assemblages/tapestries of stockings, sunscreen, foam, broken glass, oils, eyeshadow, goo and gunk, there is a prescient ambience of a post-capital landscape – abstractions, simultaneously sensual and viscous, emerging from the depths of a volatile system of things, of objects, commodities and conditions.

Samara worked with Despacito Art School to explore experimental mark-making and image transfer, focusing on the medium of latex. The process involved staining, casting patinas, bruising, and building layers with experimental image transfers, sharing live learnings and failures.

Samara has also led sessions as part of the Associates Programme and as a guest artist for Lacuna.

Guest Artist
Visiting Artist Module, 2024

Ingrid Pollard is a photographer, media artist and researcher. She is a graduate of the London College of Printing and Derby University. Ingrid has developed a social practice concerned with representation, history and landscape with reference to race, difference and the materiality of lens based media. Her work is included in numerous collections including the UK Arts Council and the Victoria & Albert Museum. She lives and works in Northumbria, UK.

Whilst at OSE, Ingrid gave an artist talk that charted her long and diverse career as an artist and photographer, and delivered a DIY camera obscura workshop, in which Associates learnt key concepts relating to perspective and image making.

Guest Artist
Visiting Artist Module, 2024

Harold Offeh is an artist working in a range of media including performance, video, photography, learning and social arts practice. Offeh is interested in the space created by the inhabiting or embodying of histories. He employs humour as a means to confront the viewer with historical narratives and contemporary culture. He has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally including Tate Britain and Tate Modern, South London Gallery, Turf Projects, London, Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, Wysing Art Centre, Studio Museum Harlem, New York, MAC VAL, France, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Denmark and Art Tower Mito.

Whilst at OSE, Harold delivered The Performance as Tool workshop, which introduced Associates to a variety of approaches to contemporary performance and participation. The session identified the contemporary concerns of artists by using performance as a primary research tool.

Guest Artist
Public Programme, 2024

Jamie Crewe makes artworks with video, text, installation, sculpture, drawing, painting, and more. These works think about constriction: the way people are formed by their cultures, environments and relationships, and the things that herniate from them as a consequence.

 Jamie’s solo exhibitions include Ashley at LUX Moving Image, London (2020); Solidarity & Love at Humber Street Gallery, Hull (2020); Love & Solidarity at Grand Union, Birmingham (2020); Pastoral Drama at Tramway, Glasgow (2018) and Female Executioner at Gasworks, London (2017).

In April 2022 Jamie released False Wife, a website and video commissioned by the University of Edinburgh Art Collection and Dr Chloë Kennedy of Edinburgh Law School, which received the EMAF Award for groundbreaking work in media art at the 35th European Media Arts Festival in Osnabrück, Germany. She received the Margaret Tait Award in 2019, a Turner Bursary in 2020, was shortlisted for the Jarman Award in 2022, and was one recipient of the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Awards for Artists 2023.

Guest Artist
Visiting Artist Module, 2024

Nicolas Deshayes is an artist living in Dover, Kent. He graduated from the Royal College of Art with an MA in Sculpture (2009) after completing a BA in Sculpture at Chelsea College of Art and Design London (2005).  He makes sculpture from a wide range of processes and materials including cast metals, factory ceramics and vitreous enamel. Drawing on the history and temperature of these processes, he explores the relationship between industrialisation and the human body.

Whilst at OSE, Nicolas led mould making and casting workshops with the Associates, and led a session as part of Lacuna.

Lead Artist
Associates Programme, 2022-23

Saelia Aparicio creates her own imagined figures that seem to mix human forms with animals, plants, or machines. These forms are completely imagined and are very specific in their gender fluidity, drawing from the ‘two-spirited’ idea that comes from Indigenous North American culture. Her wall tapestries – collaboration with fashion designer Craig Green –  feature a series of folk-inspired portraits that deliver an expressive take on the human form. From conceptual nature-inspired motifs like parts of walnut trees and poison ivy, the hand-stitched artworks showcase an imaginative mashup of ancient anatomical diagrams and contemporary art.

She finds inspiration from classical mythology and the transformative hybrid forms found in Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia and pre-Columbian Meso-America – hybrids between animals and humans such as the sphinx, Anubis or the Mayan Camazotz.

Whilst a lead artist at OSE, Sealia developed When The World Looks Back At You: On Storytelling, Ecology and the Weird.

Guest Practitioner
Social Practice Module, 2023-24

Sepake Angiama is the artistic director of the Institute for International Visual Art in London and a curator and educator whose praxis lies in the discursive and social framework, in order to collectively rewrite our understanding of the world. This has inspired her to work with artists who disrupt or provoke aspects of the social sphere through action, radical forms of pedagogy, and architecture. While in her position as Head of Education, Documenta 14 she initiated the project Under the Mango Tree – a self-organized gathering of unlearning practices.

Sepake was the co-curator for the third edition of the Chicago Architecture Biennial where her research led her to engage with architects who are embedded in transforming the city through pedagogy, direct action, and community engagement.

Guest Practitioner
Social Practice Module, 2023-24

Amal Khalaf is a curator and artist and currently Director of Programmes at Cubitt, London and Projects Curator at the Serpentine Galleries, London where she has worked on the Edgware Road Project since its inception in 2009.  Here and in other contexts she has commissioned and developed residencies, exhibitions, workshops and collaborative research projects that address the role of art operating within pedagogy and social urgencies.

Working with artists, activists, architects, broadcasters, students, urbanists, social services, teachers and labour organisers across different backgrounds, the many long term projects she has initiated, focus on how we work together and the possibilities of collectivity.  In addition she has developed an intensive arts and migrants justice programme and community development initiatives through Implicated Theatre (2011-2019) using Theatre of the Oppressed methodologies to develop interventions, curricula and performances with ESOL teachers, hotel workers, domestic workers and other migrant justice organisers.

Guest Artist
Associates Programme, 2022-23

Tenant of Culture is the moniker of Hendrickje Schimmel, a Dutch artist working in the space between sculpture and couture. Her objects are assembled with the flying tempo of fashion production, but these garments are clearly not factory made. The hand is visible inside every cut, stitch and rip. The work has been gripped and jammed into itself.

Schimmel’s objects range from near-functional clothing to collaged tapestries of ragged fabric. The garments are provocations, pointing towards radical futures, obscure historical movements and the strobing micro-trends of the current moment. The footwear is abstract; the hats are speculative and the tops dystopian. It’s all patched together from upcycled scraps, and when I imagine the culture that might grow up around these outfits, I am impressed by its vision and concerned for its quality of life.

Solo and two-person exhibitions include: National Gallery Prague, Prague (2023) Camden Art Centre, London (2022); Ivory Tars, Glasgow (2022) with Gillian Lowndes and Soft Opening, London (2023).

Lead Artist
Associates Programme, 2020

Anthea Hamilton studied at Leeds Metropolitan University and the  Royal College of Art, London. She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2016.

Hamilton is renowned for her art-pop, culture-inspired sculptures and installations that incorporate references from the worlds of art, fashion, design and cinema. Research is at the heart of Anthea Hamilton’s work, whether it is into art nouveau design, the roots of 1970’s disco or lichen. Each subject is studied closely and used as a lens through which to view the world.

Whilst at OSE, Anthea Hamilton conceived and lead a bespoke curriculum which took the collaborative nature of her practice and the iconic figure of the sailor as starting points. For two months, the curriculum worked across scriptwriting, film production, costume making and performance, inviting a number of guest practitioners to share their approaches and methodologies.

Lead Artist
Associates Programme, 2019

Marguerite Humeau’s supernatural, biomorphic sculptures could have been lifted from a work of science fiction, occupying a world in which hypermodern technology and medical equipment have displaced human life. A vacillation between speculative science and ancient myth, robot and fossil, biomedical engineering and archaeological discovery is a defining characteristic of Humeau’s practice, which plays out in physical spaces that read as cyborg temples and laboratories of the extinct.

Working with researchers in the fields of zoology, biology, and paleontology, Humeau has dyed carpets with every chemical in the human body, made soundscapes conjuring noises made by prehistoric animals, created contemporary versions of Paleolithic-era “Venus” statuettes, and directed pink hippopotamus milk through simulated veins. In new pieces made from aluminium, salt, plastic ocean waste, and algae for The Milk of Dreams, Humeau borrows from research on ecstatic rituals, trances, animal morphology, and climate change. Posing ritual as an expression of consciousness, she stages sinuous marine sculptures as if caught in a moment of religious rapture. What emerges here is a type of sublime understanding of mortality that may exist beyond the domain of humans.

Guest Artist
Associates Programme, 2017

Monster Chetwynd (b. 1973, London, England) lives and works in Zürich. Chetwynd’s multifarious practice – spanning interactive performances, film, collage, painting and installation – interweaves elements of folk spectacle, popular culture and surrealistic cinema.

Chetwynd is known for per anarchistic bric-a-brac style performance pieces, featuring handmade costumes, props and sets. Describing per work as ‘impatiently made’, ze often re-uses cheap materials that are easy to process to create costumes and scenery that are easy to deploy and adapt, while incorporating eclectic cultural references – from Bertolt Brecht to Bugsy Malone. At the core of Chetwynd’s practice is an emphasis on the work’s collective development.


Visiting practitioners

Since the opening of OSE in 2013, practitioners invited by the OSE Associates and the team have included:

John Akomfrah, Sepake Angiama, Saelia Aparicio,Attua Aparicio, Eileen Simpson and Ben White (Open Music Archive), Alex Margo Arden, Barby Asante, Ed Atkins, Eric Baudelaire, Ed Baxter, Maria Benjamin, Lee Berwick, Kathrin Böhm, Marsha Bradfield, Polly Brannan, James Bridle, Adam Broomberg, Sam Causer, Paolo Davanzo and Lisa Marr (Echo Park Film Center), Monster Chetwynd, åbäke and Philippe Ciompi, the vacuum cleaner Shortwave Collective, Celine Condorelli, Clair Le Couteur, Jamie Crewe, Tenant Of Culture, Neil Cummings, Anna Cutler, Alice Davies, Jeremy Deller, T.J. Demos, Nicolas Deshayes, Benedict Drew, Guillaume Désanges, Tim Etchells, Rita Evans, Sian Fan, Mark Fisher, Julie Freeman, Patrick Goddard, Paul Goodwin, Leah Gordon, Melissa Gronlund, Ahmet Ögüt, Rose Hall, Richard Wentworth, Catherine Wood and Martin Hargreaves, Bahbak Hashemi-Nezhad, Owen Hatherley, Sarah Haylett,Winnie Herbstein, RENU (Renu Hossain)Marguerite Humeau, Chris Jones, Janice Kerbel, Andrew Kerton, Amal Khalaf, Cynthia Lawrence-John, Mire Lee, Hannah Lees, Myriam Lefkowitz, Franck Leibovici, Lawrence Lek, Marysia Lewandowska, Matt Lewis, Maria Lind, Sean Lynch, Hamish MacPherson, Richard Malone, Francesco Manacorda, Rosanna Martin, Simon Martin, Sarah McCrory, Darren McGarvey, Anna Minton, Phil Minton, Genetic Moo, Fred Moten, Daniel Oliver, Sofia Niazi, Rose Nordin and Heiba Lamara (OOMK), Shenece Oretha,Flora Parrott, Lee Patterson, Holly Pester, Ruth Potts, Feral Practice, AND Publishing, Michael Rakowitz, Robinson, Tracey Rose,Jerszy Seymour, Tai Shani, Daniel Sinsel, John Smith, Cally Spooner, Simon Starling, Fatos Üstek, Linda Stupart, Sally Tallant, Jack Tan, Mabel Tapia, Joelle TaylorSam Thorne, Cecilia Wee, Pablo Bronstein and Ellis Woodman, Ken Worpole, Andrea Luka Zimmerman.John Akomfrah, AND Publishing, Barby Asante, Ed Atkins, Ed Baxter, Eric Baudelaire, Maria Benjamin, Lee Berwick, Kathrin Böhm, Marsha Bradfield, Polly Brannan, Adam Broomberg, Pablo Bronstein and Ellis Woodman, James Bridle, Sam Causer, Monster Chetwynd, Celine Condorelli, Neil Cummings, Paolo Davanzo and Lisa Marr (Echo Park Film Center), Jeremy Deller, Guillaume Désanges, T.J. Demos, Nicolas Deshayes, Benedict Drew, Tim Etchells, Rita Evans, Sian Fan, Feral Practice, Mark Fisher, Julie Freeman, Genetic Moo, Patrick Goddard, Rose Hall, Winnie Herbstein, Marguerite Humeau, Paul Goodwin, Leah Gordon, Melissa Gronlund, Bahbak Hashemi-Nezhad, Owen Hatherley, Cynthia Lawrence-John, Chris Jones, Janice Kerbel, Andrew Kerton, Clair Le Couteur, Hannah Lees, Franck Leibovici, Lawrence Lek, Myriam Lefkowitz, Marysia Lewandowska, Matt Lewis, Maria Lind, Sean Lynch, Sarah McCrory, Hamish MacPherson, Francesco Manacorda, Rosanna Martin, Simon Martin, Darren McGarvey, Anna Minton, Phil Minton, Fred Moten, Sofia Niazi, Rose Nordin and Heiba Lamara (OOMK), Ahmet Ögüt, Daniel Oliver, Eileen Simpson and Ben White (Open Music Archive), Flora Parrott, Lee Patterson, Holly Pester, Ruth Potts, Michael Rakowitz, Robinson, Jerszy Seymour, Tai Shani, Samara Scott, Daniel Sinsel, John Smith, Cally Spooner, Simon Starling, Linda Stupart, åbäke and Philippe Ciompi, Sally Tallant, Mabel Tapia, Jack Tan, Sam Thorne, Fatos Üstek, Richard Wentworth, Catherine Wood and Martin Hargreaves, Ken Worpole and Andrea Luka Zimmerman.