Womxn of Colour Art Award 2022
198 Contemporary Arts and Learning is excited to announce Rebecca Bellantoni as
winner of the Womxn of Colour Art Award 2022.
Rebecca Bellantoni is an artist based in London. Bellantoni mines everyday occurrences and abstracts them. Investigating, through the lens of metaphysics, spirit/energy, religion and the aesthetics of them. Troubling the accepted/expected ‘real’; and the experiential ‘real’; how might these removed borders offer portals to self, collective reasoning and healing thought/action. Black geographies and their attendant realities are a research element.
As the winner, Bellantoni will be awarded a £5000 unrestricted bursary. All shortlisted awardees will receive a portfolio review and mentor lunch with one of the judges, artist development support over the next year, and participation in the WoCAA Finalists group exhibition at 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning in 2023
The full list of awardees is as follows:
Winner:
Rebecca Bellantoni
Shortlisted Awardees:
Tyreis Holder
Tyreis Holder is an Artist, Poet and Visual Storyteller from South London, with heritage reigning from Jamaican/St Vincent. She works heavily in mediums pertaining to installation, textiles, performance, poetry, sculpture and sound.Her practise centres around explorations of self and identity, the relationship with the mind, particularly within regards to navigating colonial spaces.
Her primary grounds for exploration explores how textiles poses as poetic language, functioning as a healing device- specifically in regards to trauma experienced by black women.Bringing lived experiences into her practice, she aims to generate conversations around how social and intimate spaces are shaped through race, diffability*, community, class, sexuality and culture.Poetry translates into garments, installations pose as poetry pages.
*She interchanges the word disability with diffability and disabled with diffable. The word disabled implies lack, ‘dis’ deriving from latin meaning ‘not’. The constant reminder of lack can have a negative psychological impact. Words have weight. However, through difference, you can find power. She has coined the terms diffabiliity and diffabled – deriving from differ-bility and differ-abled, but has chosen a phonetic spelling approach drawing from the structure of patois.
Arianna Cheung
Arianna Cheung is a video artist and multidisciplinary designer who works predominantly with moving images, photography, and sounds, revolving around the everyday and quotidian aspects, reconstructing the familiar into the realms of intimacy and absurdity as visual poetry.
Based on the present and current questions in a societal context, documentation and conversations are enfolded in the process, surrounding how each individual grasps and senses a certain topic, issue, or question. Drawing imageries from and rearranging narrated materials as fragments, gradually forming a non-linear structure to interrogate viewers’ understandings through simultaneous experiences and experimental multimedia techniques.
Her recent works have been selected and exhibited in The Next Thing Moving Image 2021 at Bury Art Museum, archived in Video Sound Archive and Envision Arts Virtual Gallery. She received a MA in Graphic Communication Design from Central Saint Martins and BFA from Parsons the School of Design.
Shamica Ruddock
Working predominantly between sound and moving image, Shamica’s current practice is primarily concerned with speculation, fiction and folklore. Considering the ways Black diasporas are engaged and explored through sound, Shamica has been particularly interested in how black technosonic production functions as a form of speculation, narrativising and worldmaking. Through film Shamica explores Afro-Caribbean puppetry, masquerade and oral folk storytelling practices.
Shamica has completed residencies with Languid Hands in collaboration with the BCA, was a 20/21 FLAMIN Fellow, they were the eleventh Postgraduate Artist in Residence at the South London Gallery (2021-2022) and is currently a Eccles Centre Visiting Fellow researching Maroon histories in ‘The Guianas’. In 2020, she was selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries.
Joyce Treasure
Joyce Treasure is a multidisciplinary artist ~ she gained her BA (1st) Honours in Black Studies from Birmingham City University. Originally trained as a silversmith, she has extensive experience working within the creative industry, including prop making and photography.
She received a certificate in scriptwriting from Birkbeck university in 1988, which led to her winning a writing award where her film was made and funded by BBC and ABI. She taught film production, worked as an editor and director, and successfully programmed and developed public events. In 2012, she began to practice as a multidisciplinary artist working in layers and body forms to slice cultural and iconic imagery together using collage, print, acrylic, assemblage and film around the topic of identity. She employs notions of ‘the carnivalesque’, Black feminism and decolonial thought to question colonialism, which seeks to examine ideas of dominance and power concerned with care.
Tamara Al-Mashouk
Tamara Al-Mashouk is a visual artist and organiser who incorporates strategies Tamara Al-Mashouk is a visual artist and organiser who incorporates strategies of hosting, art making and live performance across a range of multi-disciplinary projects. Through multi-channel video, performance and architectural installation, her work explores the movement of people, negotiating the relationship between belonging, memory and collective histories.
Jessica Ashman
Jessica Ashman is a London based artist who works in animation moving image, music performance (under the name Spirit Sigh) and arts education.
Jessica creates experimental film narratives and soundscapes that explore the connections between identity, race and gender, inspired by Black speculative fiction and Black radical feminist theory.
This is an exciting time for 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning. As we celebrate 33 years as a visual arts organisation in 2020 we embarked on a major capital redevelopment of our premises, tripling the space to create an exciting and innovative mix of visual arts, community resource, industry skills training and creative enterprise across three floors.
This biannual award is a part of our ongoing commitment to support and honour Womxn of Colour artists within the UK.
For any further enquiries on the award please email info@198.org.uk