Announcing the selected artists for UK New Artists Weekender at CCA Derry~Londonderry 2022

UK New Artists' 5th Weekender residency is organised in partnership between the Centre for Contemporary Art Derry~Londonderry and UK New Artists. The Weekenders are micro-residencies: an opportunity to take some time, meet other artists, collaborate and replenish thinking and possible directions for practice. This Weekender will be exploring how languages bring people together and keep people apart. The Weekender is happening at CCA Friday 20–Monday 23 May 2022.

Over the weekend, artists will work with 2021 Turner prize winners Array Collective, as well as taking part in a range of activities such as; periods of walking and talking, collective facilitated discussions, and time to personally test thinking/ideas at CCA or the physical fabric of Derry~Londonderry as a town. The Weekender is curated by Sophie Mak-Schram. We are pleased to welcome Alice Harry, Cal Freeman, Dudley Dream Walsh, Kinnari Saraiya, Kristina Genova and Suds McKenna to our city very soon!

Alice Harry is currently a post-grad at the RCA. Her practice takes place between personal, lived experience and relations with the choral. Interested in rituals, ‘things’ and the body, she uses humour, fragmentation and pop culture as a means to resist the dominant, patriarchal, capitalist language that surrounds us.

Cal Freeman is an emerging Irish Film Writer & Director based in Manchester. He focuses on telling stories that unravel the joys and struggles caused by contradictions in our identities by pulling together ideas of cultural pride and heritage, love, family and justice.

Dudley Dream Walsh (they/he) is a Nottingham-born artist working with painting, drawing and writing currently living at DARP (Derbyshire Artist Residency Program) and member of Chaos Magic Space, Nottingham. Graduate of the Alt MFA School of The Damned 2016. Exploring magic, land, sickness, language, recovery, masculinity and class.

Kinnari Saraiya is an artist, curator and writer that works across film, interactive digital environments, installation, animation, folk dance and sound which allows her to interweave complex narratives together. Her work thrives in the mistranslations of language, where myth weaves around history forcing the collision of pr- humanist thought and post-humanist desire.

Kristina Nenova is a Bulgarian interdisciplinary artist currently based in Leeds. Utalising performance, video, textiles and archiving through conversations, their art is concerned with the experiences of migration, belonging, memory and identity. Their most recent and ongoing project documents the history and traditions of Ravnogor, a village in south Bulgaria, through conversations about the past and present with its residents.

Suds McKenna is an Irish artist based in Glasgow. His practice addresses drawing as a performative process, citing disparate media traditions as descriptors for identity and commonality. Depicting individual and social bodies within scenes of civic life, these works explore referentiality as a gesture of personal experience and queer world-building.