Announcing the 2022 CCA Research Associates

Each year five CCA Research Associates are selected through an open call (with at least two from Northern Ireland) for emerging research-based practices. CCA Research Associates have extensive access to our archives and networks with the potential to develop longer-term projects with CCA and our wider Programmes. An annual event brings the associates to CCA to share their practices with each other and our audiences through workshops/performance/lecture. We work with the Associates to secure funding for travel/materials/accommodation and act as critical friends to help them develop their practices.

Meet our new Research Associates for 2022:

Bojana Janković, Vishal Kumaraswamy, Lucie McLaughlin, Eimear Walshe and Evelyn Wh-ell

The new cohort joins the 2021 and 2020 Research Associates; from 2021 Sinéad Bhreathnach-Cashell, Chinasa Vivian Ezugha, Marie-Andrée Pellerin, Ben Weir and Frances Whorrall-Campbell and 2020 Renèe Helèna Browne, Alessia Cargnelli, Ciarán Ó Dochartaigh, Borbála Soós and Katharina Stadler.

For more on the previously selected cohorts, click here.

Bojana Janković

Bojana Janković is a Belfast-based Eastern European artist exploring immigration: national and displaced identities, migrant labour, and forms of discrimination. Her performances, installations, texts, and non-denominational works have appeared in physical and digital spaces in the UK, Serbia, and internationally, including in Tate Modern (London), Center for Art on Migration Politics (Copenhagen), and in collaboration with Home Live Art (Hastings) and Performing Arts Hub (Norway). Bojana’s practice frequently involves collaboration with audiences excluded from cultural institutions and works to disrupt normative modes of participation.

Bojana is part of Critical Interruptions, a writing cooperative, and organises as part of Migrants in Culture. Her PhD research at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama investigates performances of Eastern European identities in the work of immigrant artists.

Vishal Kumaraswamy

Vishal Kumaraswamy is an artist and filmmaker based in Bangalore, India. He has an MA in Photography from Central Saint Martins, London & his works have been shown at several international exhibitions including The Venice Biennale’s Research Pavilion, Athens Digital Arts Festival, CCS Bard College, Vector Festival, The Royal College of Art & Furtherfield and are distributed by VIVO Media Arts, Vancouver. Vishal has previously been an artist in residence with the US Consulate General Mumbai, Contemporary Calgary in Alberta, SAVAC Toronto & Vital Capacities, videoclub UK. He is a recipient of the Australia Council for the Arts Transmitter Delhi X Darwin Grant & the Warehouse421 Artistic Research Grant (2021-2022). Vishal is currently developing works for SITE Gallery Sheffield, & Contemporary Calgary, Canada.

Vishal is the founder of the international artist collective; Now You Have Authority, a collaborative practice through which he has curated exhibitions, residencies, and delivered workshops at the Tate Modern’s Tate Exchange Programme, Tanzfest Aarau and The Sluice Biennial. He also develops independent curatorial projects with a focus on contemporary South-Asian artistic practices and his most recent project www.the-lack-of.com was shown as part of The Wrong Biennale.

Lucie McLaughlin

Lucie McLaughlin is a Belfast born artist, writer and critic. Her research is grounded in thinking around the entangled relationship between world and words, connecting with the idea of an ‘art writing’ practice that is placed in relation to both text and artistic outputs, which she realises in forms such as moving/still image, sound, writing and performance. She is interested in how the immaterial architectures of language and art exist in proximity to each other, where language can be made unfamiliar by a collapse in distance between the ‘ordinary’ and the imaginative, and how certain political atmospheres and socio-psychological states that in themselves cannot be easily articulated, emerge through practice. Since 2020, she has been completing the MLitt in Art Writing at Glasgow School of Art. She has worked recently with Catalyst Arts, Belfast (And, if we observe the present) and CCA Derry-Londonderry (URGENCIES, 2021). Her book, Suppose A Collapse, was released in May 2021 with JOAN, a new publishing project for interdisciplinary artists’ writing.

Eimear Walshe

Eimear Walshe is an artist from Longford. Their work is made public through sculpture, publishing, video, performance and lectures, or combinations of these forms. Their practice is based on research in fiscal and sexual economies and histories, working to reconcile the aesthetics, values and tastes of their queer and rural subjectivity. They also publish writing in various adaptations of artist memoir in reference to role models including Claude Cahun, Dolly Parton, and St Joseph.

Selected exhibitions include EVA international, Limerick, (2020); Bodies of Knowledge, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, (2019) and GRETTA with Roscommon Arts Centre, at King House Boyle, 2019. Eimear Walshe is supported by the Arts Council Visual Artist Bursary and Project Award. During two research fellowships at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Eimear Walshe set up the projects, Separatist Epistemologies (2018) and The Department of Sexual Revolution Studies (2019) with Design Academy Eindhoven, a public programme to explore how contemporary sexual practices might help us to better understand the relationship between sexuality and society today, including issues such as politics, housing, and technology.

Evelyn Wh-ell

Evelyn Wh-ell is a researcher, writer and artist, currently completing a PhD in butch and transmasc aesthetics within the Centre for Film and Screen Studies at the University of Cambridge. Their research and artistic practice interrogates issues of queer/trans* representation within the politics of knowledge production, using creative-critical strategies such as parody to deflect normative epistemologies which foreclose marginalised expressions.

Evelyn has also worked with and led workshops for numerous arts organisations, including The Horse Hospital, Kettle’s Yard and Wysing Arts Centre, helping to redevelop and reimagine the relation of creative practice as a mode of resistance and community building. Their critical and creative writing has been published in Another Gaze, Cambridge Literary Review, permeable barrier, b l u s h lit, with a short story forthcoming from Sticky Fingers Press as part of the ‘Dead Lovers’ series. Alongside this, Evelyn is also the host of ‘The Disenfranchised Things Talk Show,’ a monthly experimental radio show on No Bounds Radio which gives voice to queer outcast objects and their deviant dreamings.