Associate Artist – Larry Amponsah

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Larry Amponsah was born in Ghana and received his MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, London (2018) after studying at Jiangsu University China (2016) and at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi in Ghana (2015). Larry is a Trustee of The Kuenyehia Art Trust in Ghana, shortlisted for the 2019 Dentons Art Prize, and won the Be Smart About Art Award in 2019.

Larry was our lead artist for the Memory Archives. Larry created Yonka Bia, a bespoke board game, which formed a part of the contents of the sensory boxes.

Recently, The Breeder presented “Genesis: The Plan & The Promise” – Larry Amponsah’s first exhibition in Athens from March 17th to April 20th, 2022. The featured artwork that above is entitled ‘I’m Already Home’ 2022, Collage, print, oil pastel and acrylic paint on canvas, 169.5 x 129.5 cm.

Amponsah’s recent solo exhibitions include:

  • ‘When A Stone Cracks, We Don’t Stitch’, 50 Golborne, London (2019)
  • ‘The Open City of Many Gods’ Billboard, Bloc Projects, Sheffield (2019)
  • ‘Imaginary Direction of Time’, The Fine Art Gallery, CSU-Pueblo Hoag Hall, Colorado (2018)
  • ‘DEAR’, Dyson Gallery, RCA Battersea, London (2019)
  • ‘DAMNED IF I DO… DAMNED IF I DON’T’ for Open Space’s: Of Hosts & Guests, Pushkin House, London (2019)
  • ‘FBA Futures Exhibition’, Mall Galleries, London (2019)
  • ‘SURGE’, East Wing Biennial 13, Courtauld Institute of Art, London (2018)
  • ‘YOUNG GUNS’, Sulger-Buel Lovell Gallery, London (2018)
  • ‘Open House CCA’, Delfina Foundation, London (2017)
  • ‘What is your local word for ‘Smile’?’, ArtXanady’s Pop-up Gallery, Labone, Ghana (2016)
  • ‘The Gown Must Go To Town’, Museum of Science and Technology, Accra (2015)

 

Larry Amponsah

Larry Amponsah stands in front of a piece from his exhibition, Genesis, at The Breeder. The piece is entitled ‘I’m Already Home’. Photograph courtesy of Larry Amponsah.

Association of Independent Museums

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KV Duong – Associate Artist

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KV Duong (b.1980 Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam) is a London-based artist with a practice that spans painting, sculpture, and performance. Duong grew up in Canada to Chinese Vietnamese parents displaced by the Vietnam War. In his work he explores themes of migration and cultural assimilation, through a re-examination of his parents’ and his own experiences. War trauma and integration correlate with the artist’s coming out as a gay Asian man.

Duong is a self-taught artist with a background in structural engineering. He has contributed to several juried competitions including Derwent Art Prize (2016), Discerning Eye (2020), Royal Cambrian (2021, 2022) & Royal Ulster Academy Open (2021), Barbican Arts Group Trust Open (2021), BBC’s Royal Academy Summer Exhibition Programme (2019), Sky Landscape Artist of the Year (2022) and Migration Museum (2022).

Duong has performed at Stockholm Supermarket International Art Fair (2021) and at various London venues including Raymond Revue Bar.

kvduong.com

 

Gaze – Live body painting performance at Raymond Revue bar: Queer Frontiers, London UK. 2019

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Presidential Chair 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Structural Integrity 2021

Sandra Shakespeare – Associate Consultant

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Sandra Shakespeare is a founding director of Museum X CIC and the Black British Museum Project. Museum X works in creative ways with people and museums to explore Black British history. Fundamental to her practice is the creation of work which explores Black British intangible heritage to reshape and expand a national cultural narrative.

Sandra also works as a Life Coach and enjoys working with arts, heritage and museum sectors. Her career includes roles at The National Archives developing access to African Caribbean archival collections. A Clore Leadership Fellow, Sandra is a co-founder member of the heritage network Museum Detox – a network for people of colour who work in museums, libraries, galleries, archives, and the heritage sector.

Museum X CIC

@BlackBritMuseum

@shakes_sandra

Kirsty Kerr – Associate Curator

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Kirsty is a visual artist and curator working on projects that span contemporary art, cultural heritage and socially-engaged practice.

As part of the 2019 New Museum School cohort, Kirsty supported Culture&’s curatorial programmes with partners, Pitt Rivers Museum, Wellcome Collection and London Metropolitan Archives, and launched the The Case ‘micro-museum’ with her exhibition on the complexities of cultural identity as a person of mixed heritage. In 2021, she co-curated Culture&’s Memory Archives: Sensory Boxes, a Covid-responsive project delivering cultural material to care homes for Black elders living with dementia.

Previously Assistant Curator with Create London/ The White House Dagenham, Kirsty supported their Becontree Centenary and New Town Culture programmes, celebrating the UK’s largest council estate and connecting leading artists with young people in care.

Kirsty continues to freelance as an artist and curator based at Spitalfields Studios, and was recently selected for the 2021 Chaiya Art Awards and 2022 UK New Artists City Takeover. Typically site-specific, her work often responds to spaces outside of the formal gallery, interrogating where, how, and by whom art is encountered or overlooked.

Kirsty is currently studying an MA in Museum Studies with University of Leicester as part of the New Museum School Advanced programme, and is a member of Museum as Muck, a network of working-class professionals pushing for greater socio-economic diversity within the sector.

Candace Allen

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Candace Allen is an American writer and cultural critic, known for her political activism during her time at Harvard University in the late 60’s and early 70‘s. She is a frequent commentator on US culture, race, and politics and contributed to the 2008 and 2012 election campaigns of Barack Obama.  She has also written two books exploring the personal, social and political power of music and writes regularly for the Guardian. Candace brought her unique insight and experience as a panellist in ‘Thelonious Monk: Modernist Pioneer’ and produced the essay ‘The demons and obsessions of jazz genius Thelonious Monk’, which derives from the event.

Jocelyn Pook

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Jocelyn Pook has written music for stage, screen, opera house, contemporary dance and concert hall. Jocelyn has worked with some of the world’s leading directors, musicians, artists and arts institutions, including Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, the Royal Opera House, Wigmore Hall and Massive Attack. Jocelyn has received numerous awards and nominations including a Golden Globe, an Olivier and two British Composer Awards. Some of Jocelyn’s most recent works have turned to the subject of mental health, with the song-cycle composition ‘Hearing Voices’ performed as part of ‘Exstatica and H7steria’ at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in 2012. ‘Anxiety Fanfare and Variations for Voices’, premièred at the Anxiety Festival in June 2014 and featured in the New Music Biennial and Hull City of Culture 2017.

Photo Courtesy Hugo Glendinning

Ama Josephine Budge

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Ama Josephine Budge is a Speculative Writer, Artist, Curator and Pleasure Activist whose work navigates intimate explorations of race, art, ecology and feminism, working to activate movements that catalyse human rights, environmental evolutions and troublesomely queered identities. Ama is a PhD candidate in Psychosocial Studies with Dr Gail Lewis at Birkbeck. Her research takes a queer, decolonial approach to challenging climate colonialism in Sub-Saharan Africa with a particular focus on inherently environmentalist pleasure practices in Ghana and Kenya. 

Ama’s fiction and non-fiction has been published internationally and she is working on her first book: a speculative duology for young adults. Ama has worked with arts institutions across the UK and abroad including the ICA, Free Word, Wellcome Collection and the V&A.

For the Culture& ‘Cyborgs’ programme at the Wellcome Collection Ama performed ‘A Shoal of Lovers Leads Me Home’. The performance was a speculative black queer fabulation – an imaginative future of a post apocalyptic, climate-changed world.

Rebekah Ubuntu

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Rebekah Ubuntu is a London-based performance and sound artist who mines the tensions between class, queerness and rebellion for their work. Inspired by Afro-futurism, electronic music and radical transfeminist authors, Rebekah presents an inimitable worldview that challenges on sonic, social and subversive levels.

For Culture&’s ‘Cyborgs’ programme at the Wellcome Collection in March 2018, Rebekah presented ‘Are You There?’, an Afrofuturist sound, video and performance work exploring unbelonging, questing and intersectional utopianism through the speculative gaze of an artificially intelligent cyborg.

Le Gateau Chocolat

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Le Gateau Chocolat’s work extends beyond the world of drag – he has a busy career in the field of contemporary opera and performance.

Le Gateau Chocolat’s work as a solo artist began in 2011 when he premièred his first solo show in the Adelaide Fringe, which then went on to tour the world as part of different festivals; Edinburgh Fringe and a subsequent run at Menier Chocolate Factory London, Wroclaw in Poland, Christchurch, Auckland, Melbourne and Sydney Opera House.

Since then he has worked with an Olivier Award winning circus (La Clique/La Soiree) and alongside contemporary composers – specifically Julian Philips (“Varjak Paw” ROH) Jonathan Dove (“Tobias and The Angel” Young Vic), Jocelyn Pook (“Ingerland” at ROH) and Anxiety Fanfare at Hull City of Culture 2017 and New Music Biennial and Orlando Gough a collaborator on “Black” (Imago, Glyndebourne.) He has sung at Wigmore Hall and with Basement Jaxx at The Barbican. Most recently Le Gateau performed the finale at the Culture& Cyborgs Late at the Wellcome Collection in March 2019 and in Richard Wagner’s Tannhäuser at the 2019 Bayreuth Festival.