Jerwood Survey III at Site Gallery

Touring exhibition Jerwood Survey III comes to Sheffield’s Site Gallery in September, to celebrate the work of 10 artists chosen to represent the broad range of topics and approaches in young contemporary art today.

This biennial showcase spans a multitude of disciplines. The early-career artists themselves are chosen by leading artists who have encountered their work and whose lasting impression led to their nominations.

This year the selected artists are: Che Applewhaite, Aqsa Arif, MV Brown, Philippa Brown, Alliyah Enyo, Sam Keelan, Paul Nataraj, Ciarán Ó Dochartaigh, Ebun Sodipo and Kandace Siobhan Walker. Let’s take a closer look at some of their work to get an idea of the breadth of artwork on display.

Nominated by Alberta Whittle, Aqsa Arif is a Scottish-Pakistani interdisciplinary artist working across film, installation and poetry. Through her work she explores her own dual heritage and the resulting experience of split cultural identities as a refugee. Her work is visually richly textured and decorative. The piece for Jerwood Survey III Marvi and the Churail tells the story of two female archetypes of South Asian folklore, in a two channel video surrounded by an ornate structure. 

Multimedia and makeup artist MV Brown uses the human body and new technologies as the starting and focal point for their performances. Their thinking is influenced by cyberfeminist, glitch feminist and transhumanist approaches, resulting in the creation of avatars, temporary identities and interactive personas. Brown works in live performance, performance to camera, sculpture, and video and was nominated by Hanna Tuulikki.

Sam Keelan, nominated by Lindsey Mendick, deals in narrative, telling stories of gay surrealism, tackling topics of individualism alongside care and community. Described as “queer doppelgängers of dominant middle class ideologies”, Keelan’s characters can often be found in mundane, domestic settings. For this show, he presents a film with a sprinkle of humour – two figures lying in bed, one of which is human and the other one a human-sized, red hot water bottle.

The exhibition is also accompanied by a limited edition publication, featuring 10 writers whose texts are paired with each artist, creating new connections between the physical pieces and the thinking around them.