Kingston University UK
Fran Lloyd
Project Lead
I am Professor of Art History and Co-Director of the Visual and Material Culture Research Centre at Kingston University London. I have published widely on contemporary and modern visual culture with a particular specialism in the history, theory and practice of migrant artists in the UK, and have over 20 years of experience collaborating on international arts and humanities projects across the museums, galleries and voluntary sectors.
With expertise in qualitative research methods, including archive driven research, interviews, visual ethnographies and participatory methods, I have led national and transnational funded research projects with multifaceted outputs of exhibitions, public events and workshops, commissioned film, on-line platforms and publications.
Projects include the on-going ‘Migrant and Refugee Artists in Britain’, initiated in 2009, that has focused on artists fleeing Nazism in Europe in the early 1940s, and contemporary artists from the Arab world, alongside studies of individual patrons and institutions that gave them support. From 2008 to 2012, I led the Dora Gordine project focusing on the Latvian-born, Estonian and Paris-trained émigré artist/designer (funded by Arts & Humanities Research Council, Henry Moore Foundation and Paul Mellon) and the ‘Public Monuments & Sculpture (PMSA), National Recording Project, funded by Heritage Lottery Grant, Paul Mellon Foundation and AHRC Research grants (2001-2006).
Azadeh Fatehrad
My research, artistic and curatorial projects centre on the representation of diaspora and double agency within the medium of still and moving images. Engaging with socio-cultural factors, I reflect on the notion of individual struggle to navigate through complex social relations and the diverse negotiations of agency within artistic practice. In November 2018, as part of my research at KU, I initiated ‘Making it Home: An Aesthetic Methodological Contribution to the Study of Migrant Home-Making and Politics of Integration - MaHoMe’ (2020-2024) to enable me to expand my research through a cross-disciplinary approach. I brought together my network from the Nordic countries including Baltic Art Center (Sweden), Lund University (Sweden) and VIA University College (Denmark) and invited Professor Fran Lloyd to lead the team in applying for NordForsk funding.
My interdisciplinary research overlaps discourses such as political science, intersectionality, migration studies, visual culture, representation, photography and architecture, as well as cultural studies. My practice ranges from still and moving images, to fictional stories, short films and artist books, which have been exhibited internationally at the Royal Academy of Arts (London), Somerset House (London), Weltkulturen Museum (the Museum of World Cultures) (Frankfurt), Lychee One Gallery (London) and The Barn Gallery (Oxford), among other places.
My recent publications include Sohrab Shahid Saless-Exile: Displacement and the Stateless Moving Image (2020) by Edinburgh University Press, UK and The Poetics and Politics of the Veil in Iran: An Archival and Photographic Adventure (2019) by Chicago University Press. I am currently on editorial Board for the peer reviewed journal MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture in Gothenburg, Sweden.
Annabelle Wilkins
I am a post-doctoral researcher on the MaHoMe project with particular interests in the intersections between home-making and belonging in contexts of (im)mobility. My background spans the disciplines of human geography, anthropology and sociology, and I have explored the topics of migration and home using ethnography, in-depth interviews, policy analysis and visual methods. Most recently, I was a Research Associate on the AHRC Translating Asylum project at the University of Manchester, where I worked on a project examining how refugees in the UK have been provided with language support, drawing on archival research, policy analyses and the narratives of refugees and interpreters with experience of displacement.
My doctoral research explored relationships between home, work and migration among Vietnamese communities in East London, drawing on the narratives of participants who migrated from Vietnam to London between 1979 and 2014, alongside ethnography and participatory visual methods. This research highlighted multiple forms of home-making in domestic, public and virtual spaces, as well as revealing how migrant home-making is enabled and constrained by precarious work, insecure housing and immigration policies. This research was published as a book entitled Migration, Work and Home-Making in the City: Dwelling and Belonging among Vietnamese Communities in London (Routledge, 2019).
I have authored and co-authored peer-reviewed book chapters and articles in journals including Area and Gender, Place and Culture. My research has been featured in publications including The Conversation and Refugee History. I have also disseminated my research in exhibitions at the Museum of the Home in 2017 and in the Refugees: Forced to Flee exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in 2020. I am Associate Editor of the journal Crossings: Journal of Migration and Culture.
Helena Bonett
I am a curator, researcher and lecturer and a post-doctoral researcher on the MaHoMe project from 2022–23. I currently teach curating and collections management at Birkbeck College and critical and historical studies at Kingston University, London Metropolitan University, and Cambridge School of Art. I have previously worked and researched at a range of museums and galleries including Dorich House Museum, Tate, the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Royal Academy of Arts and the Midlands Arts Centre.
My research utilises ethnographic and participatory methodologies as a means of unlocking cultural meaning with a particular focus on creative and museological spaces – including artists’ studios and homes that have been curated into museums – and objects – including personal objects, tools and miscellanea that tell different stories of artists’ lives and experiences. Through participatory curatorial methods my aim is to shift traditional museological heritage framings of artists’ legacies to include those whose legacies and knowledges have traditionally been marginalised, owing principally to the intersections of race, gender and class.
I have published broadly across the arts and humanities, with particular focus on twentieth-century sculpture and museums, including directing a film, Trewyn Studio (2015), for the Tate St Ives Artists Programme on the former studio-home of the sculptor Barbara Hepworth in St Ives, Cornwall, and editing the online research publication The Squatter Years: Recovering Dorich House Museum’s Recent Past (2019–21) and co-authoring a new museum guidebook and interpretation materials for Dorich House Museum, the former studio-home of the sculptor Dora Gordine.