Curating and Coalition: Challenging and Expanding the Art World in the Wake of Nnena Kalu’s Turner Prize Win

Biography

Rózsa Farkas is the founding director of Arcadia Missa, a London-based gallery representing emerging and mid-career artists, including Rene Matić and Nnena Kalu, both of whom were shortlisted for the 2025 Turner Prize. Arcadia Missa was established as a commercial gallery in 2015 after running as a project space for several years. As well as its gallery programme, Arcadia Missa has been an active publisher of journals and artist books. Farkas is a former lecturer and researcher, and much of the gallery programme promotes artwork that critically engages with the social and political conditions of our time.

Jes Fernie is an independent curator, writer and lecturer. She works with galleries, visual arts organisations, universities and artists to make exhibitions, public artworks, residency projects and public programmes across the UK and abroad. She is interested in the ways that artworks are viewed, positioned, and transformed by a live relationship with audiences, contexts and conditions. She launched the Archive of Destruction in 2021.

Jes is currently Course Leader, MA Culture, Criticism and Curation at CSM and visiting lecturer at universities including the RCA, Royal Academy Schools, the Slade and Goldsmiths College. She is Chair of the Board of Trustees at Matt’s Gallery, London.

Charlotte Hollinshead, Head of Artist Development, has worked with ActionSpace for 30 years and has led the ActionSpace South London Studio at Studio Voltaire since 1999. She supports artists with complex disabilities in developing their individual art practice and delivers an extensive range of commissions, residencies, projects, live events, and exhibitions. Charlotte also devised and manages ActionSpace’s innovative participatory, live art programme ‘Make It Live’.

Outside of ActionSpace, Charlotte has her own participatory practice, devising and delivering inclusive projects with SEN school and community organisations, galleries and museums.

Tom di Maria is the Director of Arts Access for All, a non-profit project that supports the advancement of art practices for people with disabilities. Prior to this, he served as Director of Creative Growth Art Center for 25 years. As Director, he worked with museums, galleries and international design companies to help bring Creative Growth’s artists with disabilities fully into the contemporary art world. He speaks around the world about artists with disabilities and their relationship to both Outsider Art and contemporary culture. Prior to this position, he served as Assistant Director of the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, at UC Berkeley. He holds a B.F.A. from Rochester Institute of Technology and a M.F.A. from Maryland Institute, College of Art. He was recently awarded the Visionary Award by the American Folk Art Museum in New York for his work supporting artists with disabilities.

Lou Mensah is a photographer, educator, and founder of Shade Media, home to Shade Art Review and the Shade Podcast: award-winning independent audio and publishing platforms amplifying the work of Black artists. Established in 2019, Shade has partnered with Tate, British Council, Hauser & Wirth, Frieze, and Bloomberg Connects, commissioning work with artists including Liz Johnson Artur, Amy Sherald and Ming Smith. Mensah teaches at Central Saint Martins and continues her photography practice.

Michael Richmond is Curator at Yorkshire Contemporary, where he recently co-curated the Turner Prize 2025 at Cartwright Hall Art Gallery and Our Turn: Practice Bradford at Loading Bay. Prior to this, he was Curator, International Art, at Tate Modern, where he worked on acquisitions, collection displays, community programmes and exhibitions. In his six years at Tate, he co-curated the touring exhibitions Cezanne (2022) and Philip Guston (2023), as well as collection displays including Vivan Sundaram, Martin Kippenberger, Rosa Barba and Monster Chetwynd, among others. Michael has previously worked as a freelance curator and coordinated the British Museum’s Asahi Shimbun Displays.

Lisa Slominski is a writer-curator and PhD candidate at Kingston School of Art. Her practice-based research examines the role of cultural intermediaries in shaping agency, identity, and representation within contemporary art, with particular attention to artists who communicate outside normative verbal frameworks. Titled A Liminal Site, her doctoral project develops an original liminal methodology informed by María Lugones’ concept of the limen as a relational threshold, foregrounding coalition, praxical awareness, and interpretive responsibility.

Alongside her research, Slominski has an extensive curatorial and editorial practice spanning exhibitions, publishing, consultancy, and public programmes. She has worked with artist Nnena Kalu since 2018, curating her work in exhibitions including Spring Syllabus (J Hammond Projects, London, 2018), Fair Vanity (Summertime, New York, 2020), and Attack Decay Sustain Release (Stanley Picker Gallery, 2026). Kalu’s work also features in Slominski’s book Nonconformers: A New History of Self-Taught Artists (Yale University Press).

Recent research dissemination includes ‘Curating Difference’ in Art Monthly (November 2025), an article for The Conversation (December 2025), and a paper presented at the College Art Association 114th Annual Conference, Chicago (February 2026). Slominski is also Senior Art Producer at Contemporary Art Society and a co-founder of Art et al.

Linsey Young is a curator and researcher who has previously held curatorial positions at Inverleith House, Scottish National Gallery and Tate. Young was lead curator of the Turner Prize in 2016, 2018 and 2024. In 2019, during a sabbatical from Tate, she commissioned and curated Charlie Prodger’s solo exhibition SaF05 at the 58th Venice Biennale. In 2023, she curated the major exhibition and publication project Women In Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970–1990 at Tate. Young began a LAHP funded PhD at the Royal College of Art focused on British feminist art practice in September 2024 and is a member of New Curators external faculty and a trustee of ActionSpace.