Aniara Omann (b. 1987, Denmark) graduated from the MFA programme at the Glasgow School of Art in 2014 and works across sculpture, video, text and performance. Recent exhibitions include Cross-Feed with Gary Zhexi Zhang, Market Gallery, as part of Glasgow International’s supported programme, Glasgow (2018), Final Incarnation, VoidoidARCHIVE, Glasgow (2016), 3016, Project Room, Trongate, Glasgow (2016), Aniara Omann / Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys, Celine Gallery, Glasgow (2015). Selected group shows include iwillmedievalfutureyou6, Kunsthal Aarhus, Aarhus (2018) GMO Scarecrow, Age of Aquarius, Copenhagen (2017),  Transformationer, ULYS Art Centre, Odense (2017), í drögum, Akureyri Art Museum, Akureyri, Iceland (2016), Yosemite, VoidoidARCHIVE, Glasgow (2015). She has been selected for 2017 Autumn Residency at Hospitalfield, UK.

Recommended Reading
City by Clifford D Simak

Anne Duk Hee Jordan considers transience and transformation as central themes in her work. Through movement and performance, Jordan gives materiality another dimension – she builds motorised sculptures and creates edible landscapes. Her sculptures are intended to draw the viewer into the present and open a dialogue between natural phenomena, philosophy and art. She asks questions about an “agency” and encourages a change of perspective. She shifts the focus away from humans towards the entire ecology.

April Lin 林森 (b. 1996, Stockholm — they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist and independent curator investigating image-making and world-building as sites for the construction, sustenance, and dissemination of co-existent yet conflicting truths. Working across moving image, performance, creative computing and installation, they dream & explore & critique & fret & catastrophise & imagine & play — for a collective remembering of forgotten pasts, for a critical examination of normalised presents, and for a visualising of freer futures as, of course, imagined from the periphery. Interweaving strands of auto-biography, documentary, queer ecology, and new media, April Lin 林森’s works are topped off with an inevitable garnish consisting of the other matters dialoguing with their brain and heart during the making process of each piece. Uniting their genre-fluid body of work is a commitment to centring oppressed knowledges, building an ethics of collaboration around reciprocal care, and exploring the linkages between history, memory, and interpersonal and structural trauma.

Recommended Reading
Pearls From Their Mouth by Pear Nuallak

ASCUS Art & Science is a non-profit organisation dedicated to bringing together art, science and beyond in the name of creativity, play, curiosity and experimentation. ASCUS catalyses collaborations across disciplines through project management, facilitates creative projects, public engagement events and provides a publicly accessible science lab and genetic modification facility for curious minds to delve into the techniques of microbiology, microscopy and DNA analysis. ASCUS has facilitated projects at the intersection of art and science by both UK and international artists including Oron Catts, Marta de Menezes, Susan Aldworth, Hannah Imlach and Aurelie Fontan.

Asli Hatipoğlu’s interdisciplinary social practice focuses on curating participatory dinners and installations that shed light on how culinary history and agricultural politics are changing our relationship to food. From working with micro-scale bacteria and yeasts to insects such as the domesticated silkworm, Hatipoğlu critically investigates ways of relating to our environment and ourselves. She researches production supply chains through performative acts to shed light to how humans influence other living organisms. After working several years as a self-taught chef, Asli deepened her knowledge with fermentation during her residency at the Food Lab Jan van Eyck Academie 2020-2021, along participating in several festivals such as Food Art Film Festival JVE (NL), Taking Root- Food Art Film Festival CCA Glasgow (UK), Foodculture Days Vevey (CH), Oerol Festival Terschelling (NL), Japanese Knotweed Festival at Mediamatic (NL) and Zamus Theaterhaus Cologne (DE).

Recommended Reading
Insect Apocalypse by Julia Janicki, Gloria Dickie, Simon Scarr and Jitesh Chowdhury, Illustrations by Catherine Tai
Silent Earth by Dave Goulson

Choy Ka Fai is a Berlin-based Singaporean artist. His multidisciplinary art practice situates itself at the intersection of dance, media art and performance. He appropriates technologies and narratives to imagine new futures of the human body. Ka Fai’s projects have been presented in major institutions worldwide, including Tanz Im August (Berlin), ImPulsTanz Festival (Vienna) and Taipei Arts Festival (Taiwan). Ka Fai graduated with a M.A. in Design Interaction from the Royal College of Art, London, United Kingdom.

Recommended Reading
Spirits without Borders: Vietnamese Spirit Mediums in a Transnational Age by Nguyễn Thị Hiền and Karen Fjelstad
What Is a Refugee Religion? Exile, Exodus, and Emigration in the Vietnamese Diaspora by Janet Alison Hoskins

Clarinda Tse 雍記 is an interdisciplinary performance maker, bodyworker and facilitator, Hong Kong-born and Glasgow-based. Their work explores emergent compositions of material ecologies and bodies as agency for worlding. Their habitat is sensual, slippery, more-than-human, transitional, drawn from everyday experience, multiplicities of selves, play and cellular reconciliation. Recent works have been shown and supported by Take Me Somewhere Festival 2023, Deveron Projects, Huntly (2022), The Work Room, Glasgow (2022), BUZZCUT Double Thrills (2022), P////ARKT, Amsterdam (2021), Ekso Space, Cyprus (2021), Unfix Festival (2021), Present Futures (2021), Transmission Gallery, Glasgow (2020), Bothy Project, Edinburgh (2020), Market Gallery, Glasgow (2019).

Recommended Reading
Conversations across place Vol . 1, Reckoning With An Entangled World edited by Nicola Brandt and Frances Whorrall-Campbell
The Kelp Congress, 2020 by Cecilia Åsberg, Janna Holmstedt, Marietta Radomska
Altered States by edited by Sarah Shin and Ben Vickers
Craniosacral Chi Kung : Integrating Body and Emotion in the Cosmic Flow by Mantak Chia, Joyce Thom

Divya Osbon is a self-taught maker based in London. She most often works in cloth, making textile works and costumes, and likes to collaborate with others from different disciplines. Throughout all of her work is a commitment to minimising waste and using materials that do not cause environmental or spiritual harm, as well as a curiosity around diasporic identity and aesthetics. She has an MA in Art and Politics from Goldsmiths, and combines her practice with working as the Deputy Director of Mimosa House, a non-profit art space in London supporting women and queer artists.

Recommended Reading
Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy

Jonny Geber is originally from Sweden and moved to Ireland in 2003 working for Irish and British archaeological consultancies as an osteoarchaeologist and zooarchaeologist before moving into academia. He completed his PhD at Queen’s University Belfast in 2012, and was appointed as Docent (UK equivalent of Reader) in Archaeology at Uppsala University, Sweden in April 2018. Jonny has received funding from the Leverhulme Trust, Irish Research Council, the Royal Irish Academy, the Johan and Jakob Söderberg’s Foundation, the Gunvor and Josef Anér Foundation, the Magnus Bergvall’s Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, the University of Otago, the Emily Sarah Montgomery Scholarship (Queen’s University Belfast), Kilkenny County Council, MacDonagh Junction Developments, and Margaret Gowen & Co. Ltd.

Recommended Reading:
Inside the Neolothic Mind by David Lewis-Williams and David Pearce

Kaajal Modi (she/they) is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher working through creative practices that explore how making in collaboration with diverse communities (human, microbial and otherwise) can be a way to open up new speculations on how we might create more resilient climate futures. Their practice is rooted in co-creation, and incorporates fermenting, cooking, image making, live art, sound, video and creative interactions to create lively and situated encounters between people, organisms and ecosystems in ways that invite critical reflection and action.

Recommended Reading:

Fermentation as an ‘art of noticing’ by Kaajal Modi
Against Purity by Alexis Shotwell
A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None by Kathryn Yusoff
Fermentation as Metaphor by Sandor Ellix Katz
Bodies of Water by Astrida Neimanis
Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis by Katherine McKittrick
Staying with the Trouble by Donna Haraway
Pleasure Activism by Adrienne Maree Brown
Fervent Manifesto by Mercedes Villalba
Fermenting Feminism by Lauren Fournier
Musings: Food, Feminism, Fermentation by Maya Hey
Kitchen Cultures: Fermenting (with) the Trouble by Kaajal Modi

Terence Heng is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Liverpool. Working on the intersections between creative practice, cultural geographies and visual sociology, he investigates the making of sacred space, spirit mediumship and diasporic identities. Terence is the author of four books, including Of Gods, Gifts and Ghosts: Spiritual Places in Urban Spaces
– a visual sociological take on Chinese religious practices in Singapore. He is currently a British Academy Mid-Career Fellow, photographing overlooked spiritual spaces in the North of England.

Recommended Reading:
Death and the Afterlife: Multidisciplinary Perspectives from a Global City edited by Kit Ying Lye and Terence Heng
Of Gods, Gifts and Ghosts by Terence Heng

Emii Alrai is an artist and trained museum registrar whose work spans material investigation in relation to memory, critique of the western museological structure and the complexity of ruins. Working primarily in sculpture and installation, her work operates as large-scale realms built in relation to bodies of research which concern archaeology and the natural environments objects are excavated from. Weaving in oral histories, inherited
nostalgia and the details of language to question the rigidity of Empire and the power of hierarchy to interpolate the static presence of history. Clay vessels, gypsum forms and steel armatures punctuate the labyrinth-like spaces Alrai creates, mimicking museum dioramas and romanticised visions of the past.

Recommended Reading:
The Dark Abyss of Time by Laurent Olivier
Absent Presence by Mahmoud Darwish
The Slow Grind: Practising Hope and Imagination by Georgina Johnson

Hazel Brill (b. 1991, London, UK) lives and works in London and Newcastle UK. Brill is currently studying for her PhD at Newcastle University, and received her MFA in Fine Art Media from the Slade School of Art London (2017). Selected solo presentations include, Pincer, Workplace Foundation, Newcastle (2023); Pup & Blubber, Block 336, Brixton (2019); Shonisaurus Popularis, Turf Projects (2018). Group exhibitions include Night Station, Whitechapel Open, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2022); Greetings, NWR Forum, Dusseldorf, Germany (2021); A Commitment, MIT film screening,
USA (2021); Realm, Collaborative installation, Southwark Park Galleries, London; I Made a Show For You, Artagon III Awards Exhibition, Artagon, Paris (2017). Awards and fellowships include, Fellow at Film London Artist Moving Image Network (2019-2020), Boise Travel Scholarship Award (2017), Connect 2016 Mentor Award with Bedwyr Williams (2016), The Hatton Art Prize (2014).

More about HBBE here.

Kara Chin is a British-Singaporean artist working across animation, ceramics, sculpture and installation. She uses playful materials and strange scales in works that come to life as hybrid creatures, constantly shape shifting between object, being and setting. Reflecting on our day to day relationship to fast evolving technologies and ecologies, works often suggest quasi-religious ceremonies, devices or artefacts set in a temporal void of fragmented references. Chin lives and works in Newcastle, UK. She holds a BA in Fine Art from The Slade School of Fine Art (2018). She was featured in Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2018, and has been awarded the Woon Foundation Painting and Sculpture Prize (2018); The Duveen Travel Scholarship, UCL (2018); The Alfred W Rich Prize, Slade (2017); Max Werner Drawing Prize, Slade (2015).

Recommended Reading:
Neighbor George by Victoria Nelson
Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban

Rae-Yen Song (b. 1993, Edinburgh; based in Glasgow) explores self-mythologising as a survival tactic, using fantasy and fabulation to establish a richly visual world-building practice informed by diasporic~ancestral mythology, Daoist philosophy, family ritual, ecology, more-than-human politics, and science fiction. Song’s world-building practice visions alternative social spaces untethered from linear conceptions of space and time, and which jettison colonial, patriarchal logics and power structures. Instead, the twin foundations of these alternative spaces are the logics of Rae-Yen’s own human family, and those of beyond-human communities – particularly in relation to notions of symbiosis and multi-species interdependency. Through drawing, sculpture, installation, textile, video, sound and performance, Song builds worlds which manifest themselves as speculative and sensory environments. These spaces serve as offerings and proposals for alternative cultures, and as multidimensional personal records that speak broadly and politically about foreignness, identity, ecological power, survival, and what it means to belong ― or not.

Recommended Reading:
Vampyroteuthis infernalis by Vilém Flusser and Louis Bec
Enfleshed by Koskentola and Marjolein van der Loo
I Ching by Richard Wilhelm translation
Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra
Cheek by Jowl by Ursula K Le Guin
The Slow Grind edited by Georgina Johnson
The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

Sophia Yadong Hao is a curator, writer and editor. Working internationally, Hao’s practice utilises a rhizomatic approach to situate the curatorial as a mode of critical inquiry directly engaging with culture and ‘the political’ as an open question. Notable curatorial projects include NOTES on a return (2009), a re-contextualisation of performance art from 1980s Britain; Studio Jamming: Artists’ Collaborations in Scotland (2014), Of Other Spaces: Where Does Gesture Become Event? (2016-2017) which evoked the ethos of feminism for an alternative politics in culture and society; and The Ignorant Art School: Five Sit-ins Towards Creative Emancipation (2021-2025) a five-phase exhibition programme examining histories and future possibilities of creative pedagogy as a radical emancipatory praxis. Hao is currently Director and Principal Curator of Cooper Gallery, University of Dundee and a Visiting Professor at the University of Sunderland.

Recommended Reading:
The Classic Mountains and Seas (Shanhai Jing)
Notes on Deconstructing the Popular by Stuart Hall
The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

Born in Edinburgh in 1980, Tommy Perman is an artist, designer and musician who blurs the boundaries between these disciplines through collaboration. Tommy has released over 50 albums, EPs and singles since his debut in 2002. He won a BAFTA for co-creating an ‘emotional robot band’ called Cybraphon which is now part of the permanent collection in the National Museum of Scotland. His visual design work has been seen across numerous high profile books, websites, record sleeves, and even projected onto the Sydney Opera House. Recent projects include: ‘The Resonant Viaduct’ – a sound installation for the National Trust’s Castlefield Viaduct community ‘sky garden’ in Manchester; ‘STACKS’ – an audiovisual exploration of the past, present and futures of three peatlands: Bodmin Moor, Dartmoor and Exmoor with Rob St John and Rose Ferraby; and ‘Echo in the Dark’ – joyous rave music made from bat echolocation recordings in collaboration with Hanna Tuulikki.

Recommended Reading
Quantum Listening by Pauline Oliveros
Tiger Work by Ben Okri
Positive Interactions by Tommy Perman

XinRan Liu is currently a Research Fellow at the School of Physics and Astronomy working on the LUX-ZEPLIN dark matter search experiment. The experiment is located at Sanford Mine, South Dakota, and has recently produced world leading exclusion limits for dark matter. XinRan specialises in ultra-low background radiation detection and has several leadership roles within the LUX-ZEPLIN experiment including on-site cleanliness during the critically important final construction phase. XinRan is also currently the lead scientist for Boulby XIA, a world-leading surface radiation detector. Outside of his research, XinRan has huge enthusiasm for public engagement. To date, his most remarkable outreach activity is the ‘Remote3’ project which he conceived and currently leads the delivery of. This project enables pupils from schools in the most remote parts of Scotland, otherwise underserved in STEM opportunities, to build, program and operate miniature Mars Rovers in the STFC Mars Yard at the Boulby Underground Laboratory.

Recommended Reading:
Dune by Frank Herbert
His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman