In recognition of the Barbican Art Trust Group (BAGT) Artworks Open 2024 prize; selected by Rudy Loewe and Phoebe Collins- James. Tanaka Mazivanhanga, presents her solo exhibition The Paths We Inherit. An instinctive visual inquiry into heritage and the totems that guide in an attempt to merge aspects of her Zimbabwean and British cultural identity. Tanaka intuitively employs print, clay and latex castings embedded with memory, to capture the fragile marks of everyday happenings. Commemorating ephemeral moments from walls, floors and thresholds within public and domestic spaces, both familiar and unfamiliar.
By incorporating collaged monoprints of Zimbabwean and British regions, The Nzvimbo Dzangu/ My Places collection, compiles warm earth tones of Zimbabwe with printed matter collected from London's urban landscape. Tanaka’s diasporic experience utilises familial archives to reveal a scenic memory, uncovering truths within cultural identity and storing them in vessels of home, sustained and reimagined. Woven fabrics and sculptural pieces map a layered sense of belonging across geographies, creating her own visual language of home and place. She questions how an idea or a sense of home has shaped or been shaped by her migration journey.
In these works, home is understood through the lens of life's impermanence, casted by histories, owned and reclaimed, shaped by what, whom, and where we carry ourselves. Each piece explores ideas around the ever emerging experiences of belonging, memory and place. Tanaka continues to question how her cultural presence impacts the urban landscape across borders through colour and intuition. Questioning: what does home mean when it exists in multiple geographies, locations? Where do memories of home live outside of its context? Or, is the concept of home an ever-changing one? How can the memories of these locations be preserved within people, places, objects, structures and print? Mazivanhanga welcomes the viewer to develop their own social and cultural fabric through this shared lense.
Through the capturing of thresholds Mazivanhanga invites the audience to examine their cultural significance in a structural world, prescribing that these foundations are vital in The Paths We Inherit.
Tanaka Mazivanhanga (b. 1991) is a multi disciplinary Zimbabwean born British artist working in London, specialising in print, installation and object making. Mazivanhanga intuitively works from an archive of personal histories and geographies to produce a language imbued with cultural experience and identity within urban and rural landscapes. Through visual and spatial language she challenges our ideas of the paths we choose and those we inherit.
Tanaka graduated with an Architecture Degree from Kingston School of Art in 2014 and an MA in Printmaking from Camberwell College of Arts in 2019. Since then she has been awarded the East London Printmakers award and the Bainbridge Prize in 2019. She was further awarded the Slaughterhaus Print Studio Award and the StART x Martin Miller’ s Gin Emerging Artist Art Prize in 2022. She went on to exhibit at the RA summer show and win The ASC Gallery Award in 2023. In September 2024 Tanaka won the Women in Art Prize First Printing prize; she went on to win the Artworks Open Award later that year.
By incorporating collaged monoprints of Zimbabwean and British regions, The Nzvimbo Dzangu/ My Places collection, compiles warm earth tones of Zimbabwe with printed matter collected from London's urban landscape. Tanaka’s diasporic experience utilises familial archives to reveal a scenic memory, uncovering truths within cultural identity and storing them in vessels of home, sustained and reimagined. Woven fabrics and sculptural pieces map a layered sense of belonging across geographies, creating her own visual language of home and place. She questions how an idea or a sense of home has shaped or been shaped by her migration journey.
In these works, home is understood through the lens of life's impermanence, casted by histories, owned and reclaimed, shaped by what, whom, and where we carry ourselves. Each piece explores ideas around the ever emerging experiences of belonging, memory and place. Tanaka continues to question how her cultural presence impacts the urban landscape across borders through colour and intuition. Questioning: what does home mean when it exists in multiple geographies, locations? Where do memories of home live outside of its context? Or, is the concept of home an ever-changing one? How can the memories of these locations be preserved within people, places, objects, structures and print? Mazivanhanga welcomes the viewer to develop their own social and cultural fabric through this shared lense.
Through the capturing of thresholds Mazivanhanga invites the audience to examine their cultural significance in a structural world, prescribing that these foundations are vital in The Paths We Inherit.
Tanaka Mazivanhanga (b. 1991) is a multi disciplinary Zimbabwean born British artist working in London, specialising in print, installation and object making. Mazivanhanga intuitively works from an archive of personal histories and geographies to produce a language imbued with cultural experience and identity within urban and rural landscapes. Through visual and spatial language she challenges our ideas of the paths we choose and those we inherit.
Tanaka graduated with an Architecture Degree from Kingston School of Art in 2014 and an MA in Printmaking from Camberwell College of Arts in 2019. Since then she has been awarded the East London Printmakers award and the Bainbridge Prize in 2019. She was further awarded the Slaughterhaus Print Studio Award and the StART x Martin Miller’ s Gin Emerging Artist Art Prize in 2022. She went on to exhibit at the RA summer show and win The ASC Gallery Award in 2023. In September 2024 Tanaka won the Women in Art Prize First Printing prize; she went on to win the Artworks Open Award later that year.
Yezan Al Laham (b. 1996, Manchester, UK) is a British-Syrian visual artist, currently working across mediums such as graphite drawing, cyanotype printing, and animation. Raised in the UAE from the age of five to eighteen, he returned to the UK in 2015 to study structural engineering at the University of Manchester. He currently lives and works in London, balancing a full-time career as an engineer with a self-taught, independent art practice.
Though he began drawing again in 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic, Yezan began pursuing art seriously in 2023. His work explores themes of emotional repression, sexual identity, and self-expression within the context of cultural and political constraint—particularly shaped by his experience growing up under an authoritarian regime where individuality was often policed.
In 2023, Yezan initiated Undisclosed, a conceptual photoshoot and multidisciplinary project that became the foundation of his ongoing series and debut solo exhibition, I EXIST IN THE GREY AREA. Featuring four models whose identities remain hidden, representing different ethnicities, gender identities, and sexual identities. The project uses photography, drawing, cyanotype, and animation to explore the emotional impact of repression and the universal need to exist freely and without fear.
In 2024, his cyanotype print from a separate series titled MANIA was selected for the ArtWorks Open 2024 group show at the Barbican Arts Group Trust. Originally conceived as a fashion editorial for the fashion collective ahia.hq, the project evolved into a visceral exploration of feeling unseen, unheard and unrecognised. Works featured blind folds, dark brown colours and motion blurs to represent madness in the mind. The exhibited Matcha-toned cyanotype print, MANIA 003, earned him the ArtWorks Open Prize opportunity to present a solo exhibition at the Barbican Arts Group Trust.
Yezan’s work continues to bridge the personal and political, using intimate visual language to examine emotional survival and advocate for the freedom to exist in-between structures, binaries, and expectations. While trying not to spoon-feed the viewer, his work often comes with written word statements and poetry to help intensify the emotional and political understanding of his pieces. "Everything is political, even existence".
Though he began drawing again in 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic, Yezan began pursuing art seriously in 2023. His work explores themes of emotional repression, sexual identity, and self-expression within the context of cultural and political constraint—particularly shaped by his experience growing up under an authoritarian regime where individuality was often policed.
In 2023, Yezan initiated Undisclosed, a conceptual photoshoot and multidisciplinary project that became the foundation of his ongoing series and debut solo exhibition, I EXIST IN THE GREY AREA. Featuring four models whose identities remain hidden, representing different ethnicities, gender identities, and sexual identities. The project uses photography, drawing, cyanotype, and animation to explore the emotional impact of repression and the universal need to exist freely and without fear.
In 2024, his cyanotype print from a separate series titled MANIA was selected for the ArtWorks Open 2024 group show at the Barbican Arts Group Trust. Originally conceived as a fashion editorial for the fashion collective ahia.hq, the project evolved into a visceral exploration of feeling unseen, unheard and unrecognised. Works featured blind folds, dark brown colours and motion blurs to represent madness in the mind. The exhibited Matcha-toned cyanotype print, MANIA 003, earned him the ArtWorks Open Prize opportunity to present a solo exhibition at the Barbican Arts Group Trust.
Yezan’s work continues to bridge the personal and political, using intimate visual language to examine emotional survival and advocate for the freedom to exist in-between structures, binaries, and expectations. While trying not to spoon-feed the viewer, his work often comes with written word statements and poetry to help intensify the emotional and political understanding of his pieces. "Everything is political, even existence".
It fit on the way here is an exhibition by Slade postgraduate Fine Art Media students that brings together the second year cohort for the final time before June's degree show. Keeping in mind our approaching departure from the course, the exhibition's one constraint is that all the works do not exceed 55 x 45 x 25 cm, the size allowance for airplane cabin baggage.
Iris Su, Jiayi * Varvara Uhlik * Rebekka Homann * Davide Gibson * Jess Heritage * Pengtian Li * Weicheng Tang * Yulin Song * Liam Mullen *Tom Hallimond * Julia-Anna Simonchuk * Yang-En Hume * Harry Maberly
Iris Su, Jiayi * Varvara Uhlik * Rebekka Homann * Davide Gibson * Jess Heritage * Pengtian Li * Weicheng Tang * Yulin Song * Liam Mullen *Tom Hallimond * Julia-Anna Simonchuk * Yang-En Hume * Harry Maberly
PROTOTYPE – A Group Exhibition
Curated by: Mohsen Zare
Dates: Feb. 22 – Mar. 10, 2025
Opening Hours: 14:00 – 18:00
Private View: Feb. 22 | 16:00 – 20:00
Participating Artists:
Aempatia | Anja Borowicz | Anna Malina | Antonio Werli | Bárbara Bezina | Bay Backner | Daniel Rojatz | Helen Maurer | Kika Nicolela | Latya Kisova | Magda Americangangsta | Michelle Thompson | Roman Drits
ArtWorks Project Space
Barbican Arts Group Trust
114A Blackhorse Lane London
E17 6AA
This project goes beyond a traditional exhibition; it’s a journey—a profound exploration of the meaning of “becoming.” The concept centers around the prototype as a metaphor for the human condition. Like prototypes, our lives are perpetually incomplete, in flux, and constantly reshaped. Inspired by this philosophy, the exhibition invites reflection on questions such as: Are we forever works-in-progress, continuously iterating who we are? Is life an endless pursuit of perfection, or is its beauty found in imperfection and incompleteness? In a world where change is imposed on our individual and collective identities, Prototype seeks to explore this ongoing transformation. Each artwork in this exhibition will represent a “prototype”—unfinished, adaptable, and reflective of the artist’s response to life’s flux.
Mohosen Zare 2025
Curated by: Mohsen Zare
Dates: Feb. 22 – Mar. 10, 2025
Opening Hours: 14:00 – 18:00
Private View: Feb. 22 | 16:00 – 20:00
Participating Artists:
Aempatia | Anja Borowicz | Anna Malina | Antonio Werli | Bárbara Bezina | Bay Backner | Daniel Rojatz | Helen Maurer | Kika Nicolela | Latya Kisova | Magda Americangangsta | Michelle Thompson | Roman Drits
ArtWorks Project Space
Barbican Arts Group Trust
114A Blackhorse Lane London
E17 6AA
This project goes beyond a traditional exhibition; it’s a journey—a profound exploration of the meaning of “becoming.” The concept centers around the prototype as a metaphor for the human condition. Like prototypes, our lives are perpetually incomplete, in flux, and constantly reshaped. Inspired by this philosophy, the exhibition invites reflection on questions such as: Are we forever works-in-progress, continuously iterating who we are? Is life an endless pursuit of perfection, or is its beauty found in imperfection and incompleteness? In a world where change is imposed on our individual and collective identities, Prototype seeks to explore this ongoing transformation. Each artwork in this exhibition will represent a “prototype”—unfinished, adaptable, and reflective of the artist’s response to life’s flux.
Mohosen Zare 2025