Simina Neagu

Simina Neagu, ‘Imperial Credit’, 2023. Photos by Ollie Harrop
Simina Neagu, ‘Imperial Credit’, 2023. Photos by Ollie Harrop
Simina Neagu, ‘Imperial Credit’, 2023. Photos by Ollie Harrop

Imperial Credit (2023)

Simina Neagu

Installation, text-based game using Twine, printed mug, business cards, mousepad, variable dimensions.

Imperial Credit, set in 2034, is an interactive fiction game, imagining a future welfare system in the age of surveillance capitalism. The main character, a migrant, tries to navigate the murky waters of precarious, illegal work and the often-baroque bureaucracy of the UK welfare system. Imperial Credit imagines a dystopian future where jobseekers are monitored via electronic bracelets and they have to constantly log their “job-seeking” activity, particularly in high-net worth, increasingly gated neighbourhoods.

The game can also be played at: https://dollcagegames.itch.io/imperialcredit

Credits:

Featuring music by Niko G x Kali, Billy Bragg, DWP hold music, The Jolly Beggarmen

Resources and research from Healing Justice London, Child Poverty Action Group, Migrants Organise, Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, Citizens Advice and others.

Simina Neagu, ’23 August’, 2023. Photos by Ollie Harrop

23 August (2023)

Simina Neagu

Film, 25min 24secs.

23 August focuses on the 4th World Festival of Youth and Students that took place in Bucharest, Romania in 1953. In the spirit of recuperating a hopeful, partly utopian story of transnational solidarity for future generations, the story is told through the perspective of two activists – John La Rose, from Trinidad, and Paul Joseph, from South Africa, who forged a life-long friendship after meeting at this anti-colonial and anti-imperialist festival. The film includes archival materials from the John La Rose Estate and George Padmore Institute, fiction and a new interview with Paul Joseph and his daughter Nadia Joseph, as well as archival images from the Senate House Library. 

Credits:

Film editing by Noah Angell. 

Thanks to Akademie Schloss Solitude, George Padmore Institute, John La Rose Estate, Senate House Library, Paul and Nadia Joseph.


Simina Neagu is an artist, curator and writer based in London. She works primarily with text that takes the shape of digital works, publications, events, exhibitions, and moving image work. Often informed by her own experience of migration, her projects have explored structures, collectivity and multiple, overlooked histories.

Simina has been commissioned by international arts organisations including Akademie Schloss Solitude (DE), International Curators Forum (UK), Salonul de Proiecte (RO), CCA Ujazdowski Castle (PL), Gothenburg Museum of Art (SE) and Project Biennial of Contemporary Art D-0 ARK Underground (BA). Her writing was published in English, Polish, Romanian, Swedish, German and Bosnian in publications such as springerin – Hefte für Gegenwartskunst, Revista ARTA, and Kajet Journal. She was part of the CuratorLab 2020/2021 programme at Konstfack University and between 2021-2022, she was part of the “Postsocialism and Art” project at TrAIN research centre, University of Arts London.

www.siminaneagu.com