Identity T-shirts Project with The Lads, Belfast

Shiro Masuyama is originally from Tokyo where he studied architecture to Masters level at Meiji University, Japan. Following international residencies at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin and Flax Art Studios, he moved to Belfast, Northern Ireland, where he’s been based ever since. Using his architectural background and Japanese identity, he makes projects which fundamentally connect people and society: so-called socially engaged art.

As an artist from Japan who has made their home in Northern Ireland, he’s in a unique position to question how identity can be influenced by the dominant political forces surrounding us.

Twins

Anna Martynenko (b.1994, Ukraine), is an artist and photographer based in Berlin, Germany. She graduated with an MA in Photography from the Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design in Halle, Germany, in 2019, and also studied Audio-visual Techniques at the Maria Curie Sklodowska University in Lublin, Poland.

Recent selected exhibitions include Men, Spoiler Galerie, Berlin; Mirrors and Reflections, Millepiani Gallery, Rome; Fashion and Fibre Art, CICA Museum, South Korea. Co-curator of Flashback Displacements at Voodoo55, Berlin, 2018. In 2020 she was shortlisted for the SpaceNet Award and she received a Fellowship with Peace Revolution Artist Retreat in 2016.

Like I think of you

Anya Naumovic is an interdisciplinary artist who works with print-based media, ceramics and text. Her work has evolved to take an introspective look at sexual trauma and the female body.

Naumovic’s work has become a bank of evidence of her rape and abuse, where previously there was none. Allowing for an exploration into intangible feelings and translating them into a domestic object that is comprehensible, she takes the private experience of abuse into the public domain; wishing to make her work accessible to all women affected by sexual abuse and violence.

Untitled (Lockdown Drawing)

Husk Bennet’s practice explores celebrities, the role of an artist and the deployment of humour within art. Graduating at home in 2020, mid-pandemic, led him to explore his ideas in new ways, such as performance, video, and music as well as maintaining his painting & drawing practice.

He likes to think about the inescapable absurdity of identity, the performativity of merely existing and how he can examine these ideas within his own experiences. He thinks Big Brother should be back on T.V. and probably run year-round, and he really enjoys Cats the movie.

Anything you can do, I can do bleeding

Nichola Irvine is a freelance illustrator and 2d animator based in Belfast. Her work is a mix of traditional and digital and her aesthetic focuses on non-conventional canons of beauty; ugly art and colourful, quirky and often textural shapes.

She likes to illustrate heavy subjects that are important to her but in a fresh, uplifting way. Her focus is to make art that is accessible to all and make a difference with her work.

I Don't Want To Be A Cowboy Anymore

Stevexoh is a self-taught “outsider” artist known for his distinctive black and white drawings, his colourful paintings, his 3D wooden cut-outs and his unusual conceptual art projects such as the globally viral “(Not a) Lost Cat” project and “Sound of Silence”, the world’s first silent podcast featuring special guests.

Stevexoh finds the world a fascinatingly bizarre place and creates art to give his hyperactive imagination an outlet. His work has been described as “art which captures so well how weird and imperfect the world is.”

Steve is at his best when he doesn’t quite know what he is doing.