Ahead of launching our new programme theme in Autumn 2024, Radar has invited a series of visiting artists to engage with research across Loughborough University’s East Midlands and London campuses.

Mathew Wayne Parkin

Mathew Wayne Parkin is a Radar visiting artist for the Summer term of 2024, pursuing their research into the physicality and performativity of sparring in sport, dialogue and interpersonal relationships, as well as accessibility and audio description in artist film. For their first visit, they will meet with Loughborough academics including Dr Eleanor Morgan and Professor Claire Warden (School of Design and Creative Arts) and Dr Emma Pullen (School of Exercise, Sport and Health Sciences), as well as sharing their work with Fine Art students.

Radar is a partner on Parkin’s solo exhibition and new body of work currently on view at London’s Cubitt Gallery as part of the programme Feeling Still in a World Which Runs, curated by Seán Elder. Comprising moving-image and sculpture, I can fit a fist in my mouth engages with acts of withdrawal, censorship, violence and memorial within intimate relationships, with particular attention given to the ways that ethics and the interpersonal play out in relation to one another. More details on the exhibition can be found here.

Nat Raha

Radar has invited poet Nat Raha to perform as part of the Gestation: Bodies, Technologies, Ecologies, Justice programme. Nat’s performance will connect to themes of queer and transfeminist world-making, and collective living as a resistant practice, in a lineage of queer and trans feminist of colour thought. This continues a dialogue between Nat and Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) visiting fellow Dr Sophie Lewis, who will be speaking as part of the wider roundtable events. This is the first part of Nat’s work with Radar, which will unfold in our programmes later this year.

Dr Nat Raha is a poet and activist-scholar, and Lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies at the Glasgow School of Art. Her books of poetry include apparitions (nines) (Nightboat Books, forthcoming 2024), of sirens, body & faultlines (Boiler House Press, 2018), and countersonnets (Contraband Books, 2013). Recent critical writing appears in Queer Print in Europe (Bloomsbury, 2022), Transgender Marxism (Pluto Press, 2021), TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, and Third Text (‘Imagining Queer Europe then and now’, 2021). With Mijke van der Drift, Nat co-edits Radical Transfeminism zine, and is co-authoring Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds (Pluto Press, forthcoming 2024). Her performance work, epistolary (on carceral islands) was co-commissioned by Edinburgh Art Festival, Scotland and TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, Galway, Ireland, 2023.

Rehana Zaman

As part of the Radar programme for Gestation: Bodies, Technologies, Ecologies, Justice, we will screen Rubus I: Workers by Rehana Zaman, with an introduction from the artist. Rubus is an ongoing body of work that encompasses moving image, sound works, scripts and performances, in collaboration with artists, poets, writers, farm workers and plant microbiologists, that takes up a multidimensional conversation on the cultural resonances and social economies of monocrop farming.

Rehana Zaman is an artist living and working in London. Her work speaks to notions of kinship and sociality, seeking out possibilities of intimacy and transgression within hostile contexts. Conversation and cooperative methods sit at the heart of her films which extend into texts, performances and group work. She has exhibited widely in the UK and Internationally. Recent presentations include Serpentine Civic, London Film Festival, Tromsø Kunstforening, BEK - Bergen Centre for Electronic Arts, British Art Show 9 (Touring), ICA Miami, Trinity Square Video, Toronto, Borås International Sculpture Biennial and Artist Film International Whitechapel (Intnl Touring). In 2019 she co-edited Tongues with Taylor Le Melle and in 2023 received the 16th Film London Jarman Award. She is a member of not/nowhere artist workers cooperative. Her films are distributed by LUX.

Sheila Ghelani and Sue Palmer

In July, artists Sheila Ghelani and Sue Palmer will be in residence with Radar as they develop their new work Atmospheric Forces. Staged as a performance taking place around a table, the work will incorporate objects, sound, film and spoken text. Atmospheric Forces is about the relationships between the forces that shape our lives: from minerals, to colonialism, to human-nature relationships.

Ghelani and Palmer previously collaborated on Common Salt, a show and tell work about empire, nature and memory. This new work is being developed through a series of week-long residencies in four locations: Wimbledon College of Arts UAL, Somerset Earth Sciences Centre, University of Reading’s Department of Film, Theatre & Television in partnership with South Street Arts and Radar, Loughborough University.

Whilst in residence on the Loughborough campus in July, the artists are keen to meet with researchers, staff and students. Opportunities to engage with Ghelani and Palmer will be shared through our Radar channels soon!