Transition + Transit 2024

Elaheh Raofi is a multidisciplinary artist whose work is deeply rooted in the rich cultural heritage of the Middle East, particularly drawing inspiration from Persian symbols and metaphors.

By day, she navigates the digital realm as a designer, harnessing her expertise in graphic design and illustration. As the sun sets, she transitions into her role as an artist, indulging in the tactile world of textiles, fabrics, and clay. Elaheh’s artistic practice is a journey of exploration, blending traditional techniques with contemporary sensibilities. Through her work, she seeks to transcend boundaries, inviting viewers to engage with themes of identity, cultural memory, and social commentary.

Her commitment to staying informed about industry trends ensures that her art remains relevant and impactful in a constantly evolving landscape. With each creation, Elaheh strives to illuminate overlooked narratives and amplify the voices of the marginalized.

Her recent installation Pirouz pays homage to Pirouz and the courageous Iranian women tirelessly fighting for their rights. Elaheh continues to use her practice of blending across varied art forms to draw attention to crucial issues while blending modernity with a deep respect for the rich traditions that inspire her work.

Elaheh’s art serves as a powerful conduit for advocacy, stirring hearts, inspiring empathy, and igniting change. In honouring the stories of everyday heroes, she celebrates the resilience and diversity of the human experience, inviting viewers to join her in a journey of discovery and reflection.

As a dedicated Spoken Word Educator, Ioney Smallhorne encourages young people to harness the power of poetry to realise their own greatness, working in schools and community groups across the East Midlands. Ioney earned an MA in Creative Writing and Education at Goldsmiths University 2019. As a filmmaker, she enjoys translating her poems to the screen. As a performer, she blends the political with the personal.

Janhavi Sharma is a visual artist from Mumbai, India, currently living and working in Nottingham, UK. 

Her work explores the intimate conflicts of remembering, misremembering, and forgetting present within the material of gendered memory. She delves into the inaccuracies, and unreliabilities of anecdotal histories from a post-colonial feminist lens, and finds meanings in the distorted, folkloric structures of storytelling.

She works across photography, sculpture, and installation – using the tools of performance and fiction in reviving, and re-assembling narratives that contribute to, and transform her accumulated experience of the ‘self’. Her work also offers uninterrupted observations of how the domestic interacts with its immediate biodiversity and traces the ecological and socio-political trajectories of the materials and processes she interacts with. 

melissandre varin (they/them) is an undisciplined atmosphere-maker
(collaborator, artist, consultant, curator).
Intimacy, embodiment, and healing
emerge from their work
via experimental partnerships contributing to freedom and liberation.⁠

Sym Stellium has been spiritual care coordinator and commissioned performance artist in this sticky experiment.

Sym Stellium aka Sym Mendez is a movement/performance artist, facilitator and ritual maker – with the exploration of connection/communication on micro and macro levels situated at the core of its practice. Its work mainly revolves around bodily autonomy, ancestral & psycho-somatic roots to physical pain, and furthering collectivity – and possibilities of liberation – from the inside out.

Usha Mahenthiralingham is an interdisciplinary artist working across visual arts, movement, film, performance, activism, and creative mentoring practices.

Based in Nottingham, she responds to the life of enquiry within health, ecology, and education. She has become increasing fascinated by the neuroscience of developmental movement and the multifaceted ways in which we play, learn, embody, relate, and interconnect.

Beginning as a Textile artist she has gone on to train in somatic and developmental movement practices. She feels passionately that intelligence is not just in the head but involves our whole wonderful selves. She celebrates keeping the creative process alive to support our own and our planet’s wellbeing. 

Yos Clark is an Ivorian artist whose mediums are dance, fashion and photography. His work is autobiographical, telling his story as a cultural outcast who strives to belonging in the Ivorian society as a gay man whose interests differ from the common Ivorian people.

Based in London since 2023, Yos Clark grew up in Côte d’Ivoire where nurtured a passion for ballet. Although it’s an unpopular art form back there, he stuck to his passion since age 8 to only start at age 17. Yos was a self-taught ballet dancer in Côte d’Ivoire for most of his life there, during his training, he found a dance teacher on Facebook who decided to give him some online classes via Skype, which they did for 2 years. Yos has since been on TV shows like Africa’s Got Talent, interviewed by BBC Africa, performed in shows where he was spotted by the British ambassador to Côte d’Ivoire who offered him a scholarship to study in the UK.

In his first year at KS Dance (Warrington) in 2018, Yos showed promise and dedication in his classes, showing more and more interest in other genres such as contemporary dance, flamenco, and jazz. In his third year, he had to go back home for visa reasons, which resulted in obtaining The Global Talent visa. Yos decided then to focus on creating his own path, from working on other artists projects in various areas such as dance, fashion and films, to now creating his own work.

Nevertheless Yos’ story has caught many attentions, and got him appearing in the book Those Who Inspire, Côte d’Ivoire alongside Didier Drogba (former Chelsea football player). Yos has his story told all over the UK alongside the screening of The Red Shoes by Powell & Pressburger. He also danced in the latest Vivienne Westwood campaign, was in Harvey Nichols window display as part of London Fashion Week for designer Roksanda, danced live in fashion shows, appeared in Vogue Italia in 2020, and the list goes on…