The FLAMIN Fellowship 2023-2024

The FLAMIN Fellowship

Composite of film stills by FLAMIN Fellowship 2023-2024 artists. From top left to bottom right, work by: Akinsola Lawanson, Edd Carr, Anna Engelhardt, River Cao, Saul Pankhurst, Natasha Thembiso Ruwona

From analogue film processed using plants to a CGI reconstruction of Russian air bases developed from satellite imagery, the six artists selected for this year’s FLAMIN Fellowship work across a broad range of experimental and creative approaches to the moving image.

River Cao is a moving image and performance artist based in London. River’s recent work has revolved around practices of mourning and memory, with a particular focus on the figure of the revenant, a reanimated body who returns from the afterlife to haunt the living.

Co-director of The Sustainable Darkroom, an artist-run research and training programme, Edd Carr works with experimental non-toxic alternatives to photographic processing. His meticulous practice involves frame-by-frame animation of hand-processed images to create moving image work that responds to our ecological crisis.

Born in the Russian border city of Rostov-on-Don, Anna Engelhardt is an alias of a research-based media artist and writer. Informed by decolonial approaches, their work interrogates structures and systems of violence in Russia’s imperialist interventions in post-Soviet states.

Akinsola Lawanson’s work is inspired by the alt-Nollywood movement, which borrows narrative, stylistic and visual conventions of Nollywood to politically subversive ends. His recent moving image work has explored West African Ifá divination, the history of the Non-Aligned Movement and Nigerian folklore.

Committed to an experimental approach to nonfiction filmmaking, Saul Pankhurst’s recent films have made use of pinhole cameras, solargraphs and camera-less animation. His current project looks at the threatened survival of manual letterpress printing to consider our relationship with language in the digital age.

Scottish-Zimbabwean artist Natasha Thembiso Ruwona’s practice combines lyrical essays with filmed footage and digitally rendered scenes. Informed by Black feminist geographies, her practice investigates how Black identities have been shaped by spaces and places in order to find methods of healing through new relationships with our environment.

The FLAMIN Fellowship 2023-2024 artists