| Photograph: Photo by Khadeeja Hamid 2022
A look back: Venice Biennale Fellowships Programme 2022
- Written byEuan McLaren
- Published date 27 March 2023
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| Photograph: Sonia Boyce, Feeling Her Way, British Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2022
Taking place every 2 years, the Venice Biennale is one of the world’s most renowned and long-standing international art festivals, attracting over 800,000 visitors in 2022.
Last year, Chelsea College of Art’s Professor Sonia Boyce represented the British Pavilion with her remarkable exhibition Feeling Her Way; becoming the first Black woman to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale. For her contribution, Professor Boyce was awarded the Golden-Lion prize for ‘Best National Participation’.
Along with Professor Boyce, the British Council’s Venice Fellowships Programme provided several students from Camberwell and Chelsea Colleges of Arts the opportunity to travel to Venice and develop their own creative practice, as well as support the work of the British Pavilion through the role of Exhibition Ambassador.
The 2022 Venice Biennale saw Chelsea alumni Isabel Conde, Graduate Diploma Fine Art, Jessica Wan, MA Curating and Collections, Khadeeja Hamid, BA Fine Art and Camberwell alum Titash Sen, MA Fine Art: Computational Arts travel to Venice as part of the Fellowships Programme. The Venice Fellows were supported with their projects through mentoring sessions with Renee Odjidja, Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Camberwell.
| Photograph: Photo by Khadeeja Hamid 2022
We caught up with the fellows to hear about their overall experience, the work they created and the learning they took from the experience.
What interested you in applying for the British Council Fellowships Programme?
Khadeeja: I’m originally from the disputed territory, Kashmir, and my family migrated to the UAE where I was born and raised. Sonia Boyce’s work resonates with me on a personal level. The wider context Boyce’s practice sits in raises a lot of interesting points of contemplation around gender, race and diaspora and this cuts across a lot of my own interests.
Titash: For a while now, I have been preoccupied with questions around identity and experience. My interest in hearing people’s stories and experiences made the Venice Biennale the perfect opportunity to explore some of these questions.
Jess: After experiencing isolation during the pandemic, I began contemplating questions about reconnecting with local communities. Historically, the Venice Biennale started out as evening meetings at Caffè Florian for Venetian artists and craftsmen. Now, it’s one of most anticipated international art exhibitions. I am very interested in how the local community has been impacted by this shift.
Isabel: I was inspired by Sonia Boyce’s engagement with discourse surrounding contemporary issues. My projects aim to create a space for meaningful and lasting dialogue and encourage political and social engagement through the arts. I was keen to exchange knowledge with like-minded creatives and take the experience with me into the future as a curator of inventive, inspiring and inclusive public programmes.
| Photograph: Photo by Titash Sen 2022
Tell us about your experience of the 2022 Venice Biennale and any projects you worked on.
Khadeeja: While in Venice, my focus was on how individual people’s stories transcend their personal context and become a part of larger collective histories. I became interested in the traditional paper-making and moulding technique used to make Venetian masks and worked with a Venetian artist, Fernando Masone at his studio, Carte Venezia, in Giudecca. Despite the significant language barrier between Fernando and I, the physical processes of making became a shared language of equal give and take.
I incorporated locally sourced spices with paper pulp and created a light sculpture which featured in our exhibition ‘I still dream that dream’. As part of our exhibition’s public programme, I lead a workshop where I drew upon the cultural practices of my Kashmiri ancestry and Middle-Eastern upbringing, by staging the ritual of a tea ceremony. While offering an insight into my own experiences of culture, I invited others to unpack theirs through the exploration of text and language.
Titash: While I was in Venice, I was struck at how navigating a different landscape shaped the way I think about my own identities. The fact that I’m a brown person has largely been in the background for most of my life, and suddenly it was not. It got me thinking about the dynamic nature of our identities and how they are impacted by our surroundings - they tend to change and morph.
Originally, I wanted to design something interactive that would relay people’s experiences and stories anonymously. However, there were technical challenges in Venice, and I had ethical concerns about using other people’s stories for my own artwork.
The work that emerged from my time in Venice was called ‘There are so many people here, I don’t know how we’ll ever get along’. It’s a short moving image work where a projection goes through a clear Perspex silhouette. The installation presents 3 layers – the moving image projection, the Perspex and the shadow. It was shown at Southwark Park Gallery toward the end of 2022. It started out autobiographical, but it turned out to be much more than that. It became about the people who have shared parts of my identities and experiences.
| Photograph: Photo by Jessica Wan 2022
Jess: My experience in Venice was challenging but exceptionally rewarding at the same time. I remember in the first meeting with other fellows, a suggestion was made that we should all be working together. Working as a team created a synergy to make things happen and developing friendships helped to address some of the challenges.
As a team, we started thinking about migration, identity and migrant agency, which refers to the taking back of ownership around the way stories and narratives around migrants are told. As we conversed about this subject, we started to explore how to enact migrant agency within the context of the local community in Venice. We reached out to different artist studios and collectives and were connected with a studio and exhibition space led by 14 Venetian artists, called Zolforosso.
The concept of community and the migrant agency is at the core of our project. We only had 2 weeks to pull everything together. We ran a public programme, which included a series of community workshops, alongside the exhibition. This enabled us to transform the exhibition space as a meeting point, inviting residents and visitors to engage and participate in the work of our artists.
Isabel: I travelled to Venice in November and developed my own personal project which I proposed in response to Sonia Boyce’s work. I wanted to connect with and learn from local groups discussing socio-political and culturally relevant issues.
My project initially aimed to identify which structures are in place in Venice to support social activism and the ways in which social activism exists. I spoke to groups like Ocean Space, Bardadino, and Il Laboratorio Occupato Morion. After connecting with other Fellows from the UK, we started working on an artwork (themed around FOMO, theatrics and the stillness of time) in response to our experiences in Venice. I’m also working on a publication with the research I undertook in Venice.
| Photograph: Photo by Isabel Conde
What did you learn from taking part in the Venice Biennale Fellowship Programme?
Khadeeja: The notes I was writing down and conversations I was having while walking around the pavilion turned into a more formalised spoken word piece, and when I came back to London, I applied for an open call to work with Abbas Zahedi, who won this year’s Frieze Artist Award. As a result, I performed work I was inspired by in Venice, when I got back home to London. I am also very pleased to say that we will be continuing the work and collaborative project we began in Venice thanks to Ruth Kathryn Jones and her organisation The Agency of Visible Women, based out of the Old Waterworks Studios in Southend.
My Venice fellowship experience has shown me that effective networking allows you to align yourself with people and opportunities that you feel passionate about and through openness and genuine curiosity you are able to create special moments and forge long-lasting bonds.
Titash: For me, Venice reiterated the importance of personal conversations. I met so many artists from so many different countries and learnt how they navigated their identities with family, friends, citizenships, countries, borders. It really enriched how I perceived the relationship between identity and experience.
Jess: We were very lucky to meet the artists at Zolforosso, and it was amazing to be able to organise the exhibition in such a short space of time with limited resources. The legacy of the exhibition has been invaluable to me. I’m so pleased that ideas and connections born out of the project could be taken further and developed. As a team, we were able to deepen the connection to local community. Ultimately, we wanted to create a conversation through our work, and I think we achieved that.
Isabel: The importance of creativity and collaboration. I’m proud to be working with other artists I met in Venice.