Practice in Dialogue is a group of artists dedicated to examining their art practices in the context of the formal structures and strategies of historical feminist artworks. Co-founded by Rose Gibbs and Catherine Long in 2014, Practice in Dialogue evolved out of a need to create a space in which to think critically about ongoing feminist activism and contemporary art practices. Practice in Dialogue has bi-monthly meetings currently hosted by Gasworks.

Participating artists include: Frederica Agbah, Miriam Austin,  Ingrid Berthon-Moine, Cécile Emmanuelle Borra, Phoebe Collings-James, Rose Gibbs, Lora Hristova, Ala Jazayeri, Catherine Long, Ope Lori, Anja Olofgörs, Minna Pöllänen,  Lauren Schneider, Martina Schmücker, NT, Karis Upton and Samiya Younis. 

Past participants include: Alison Ballance and Abigail Smith. Practice in Dialogue meet on a bi-monthly basis and provide each other with critical support and peer mentoring.

Artists' Biographies



Frederica Agbah 
Frederica Agbah is a Yorkshire born photographer and visual artist based in London. Her work interrogates powerlessness, personal space, fractured identities and problematic relationships. Her practice captures interrelated characters within communities and cliques, constructing layered visual narratives and illuminating shared cultural histories.
Instagram @candidandbright
 
 
Miriam Austin
Miriam Austin is an artist based in London. She graduated from the Royal College of Art with an MA in Sculpture in 2012 and in Oct 2019 will begin study on an AHRC Funded PhD in Fine Art at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford. She works with sculpture, performance and video to address questions about power, subjectivity and representation. She is currently developing a project that explores the relationship between ritual, myth, ecological fragility, and the politics of the body. This work emerges from a body of research that attempts to address the entanglement of privilege, oppression and representation that always already accompanies Western interest in “native” or “folk” religions and cultures, interrogating the possible links between local mythology, global inequality and ecological disaster.
www.miriamaustin.co.uk
 
 
 
Ingrid Berthon-Moine
Ingrid Berthon-Moine is a French visual artist based in London. Her work employsa variety of media including photography, painting, sculpture and text to examine themes relating to gender, technology and personal biography. Berthon-Moine has exhibited in various group shows at venues including Världskultur Museerna, Sweden (2018), Espace Temoin, Geneva, Switzerland (2018), ICA, London (2015). 
https://www.ingridberthonmoine.com/work
 
 
Phoebe Collings-James
Phoebe Collings-James is an artist, riding slalom against coherence, losing clarity whilst failing often. The enzyme like processes of ceramics and sound making have grown to be cornerstones of her work, evoking live and active gut cultures, subaltern spirit guides and the detritus of devotional memorabilia. 
www.phoebecollingsjames.com
 
 
Cécile Emmanuelle Borra
Cécile Emmanuelle Borra is a French born London based artist, graduate of Goldsmiths College. Working predominantly in installation, she uses a variety of medias including film, photography, text, wallpaper, textile, etc., as well as found objects. Drawing from a feminist perspective and from the writings of Judith Butler, Giles Deleuze and Paul B. Preciado, her art practise explores notions of "desire" and examines the commodification of the body, and most particularly continues her longstanding representation of men as objects of the female gaze. 
https://cecileemmanuelleborra.weebly.com
 
 
 
 
Rose Gibbs
Rose Gibbs is an artist and writer who regularly initiates and contributes to talks and symposiums, including Who’s Holding The Baby?at Tate Britain and WomenWorking Collectively at The ICA. Her work seeks to think through feminist concerns via these mediums and platforms. She is co-founder of a number of collaborative projects, has led a study group at Cubitt and has curated and exhibited at the ICA, Beaconsfield and The Showroom.
She was a speaker at the Labour Party’s The World Transformed and is currently working with a group of activists on Labour’s cultural policy manifesto. She runs a community garden on the estate where she lives. 
www.rosegibbs.com
 
 
Lora Hristova
Lora Hristova’s multi-disciplinary practice explores sexuality, shame and cultural identity. She has exhibited internationally after graduating from Central Saint Martins in 2009, including a solo show at The Zabludowicz Collection as part of their emerging artists 'Invites' programme. Her work is part of The University of the Arts Collection, The Zabludowicz Collection and private collections in London including those of Les Mes and Tracey Emin. 
 
 www.lorahristova.com
 
 
Ala Jazayeri
Ala Jazayeri was  born in Iran three years after the Iranian Revolution and one year after the commencement of the Iran-Iraq war. Her recent work explores the relationship between place, memory, and dislocation in connection to the emotional and affective investments they provoke and generate. At present she is returning to various sites which were formative in her childhood and adolescence growing up in southwestern Iran during the eight-year war, but which have since been either irrevocably lost or transformed for better and for worse. Her work tries to capture how we remember belonging, and a sense of attachment which can never be fully recovered, just as it is suffused with a profound sense of mournful loss for a place which is both familiar, and yet ceased to be wholly recognisable. She currently lives and works in Oxford and London, UK. She achieved BA degree in Fine Art from Wimbledon College of Arts (UAL) in 2015. She subsequently went on to pursue an MFA Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London, from which she took a break in 2017 and is presently part of the Turps Banana correspondence painting course. 
www.alajazayeri.com
 
 
Catherine Long
Catherine Long is a visual artist with a background in contemporary dance. Her work uses video, 
dance, clay and textiles to explore the materiality of the body from a feminist perspective. She is 
the co-founder of Practice in Dialogue and has curated and exhibited at the ICA, Beaconsfield and The Showroom. 
www.catherinelong.co.uk
 
Ope Lori
I Want Me Some Brown Sugar, (2013) at 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning, put Ope Lori’s work on an international stage. Other seminal shows include La Parole aux Femmes: Women Speak Out (2014/15) at La Fondation Blachère, France, where she has exhibited alongside Kara Walker and Ayana Jackson and in 2016 was part of ‘Now! Now!... In more than one place’ (2016) a show curated by Sonia Boyce (OBE, RA) around black British artists and modernisms. 
 
www.opelori.com
 
 
Anja Olofgörs
Anja Olofgörs is a Swedish artist working between London and Stockholm. She graduated with an MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2015 after completing a BFA at Valand Academy in Gothenburg in 2013. Her recent projects include Oval Window at Gerald Moore Gallery, London, Field/s ONE at SluiceHQ, London; In Whose Eyes? with Practice in Dialogue at the Beaconsfield Gallery, London; Notes on Motion, Art Licks Magazine Issue 22, London; and an interview with iheartwomen, London. Olofgörs has just been awarded a two years studio residency at Transit, Stockholm.
www.olofgors.com

Minna Pöllänen 
Minna Pöllänen (b.1980) is a Finnish visual artist living and working in London. Pöllänen’s installation-based practice weaves together various media including sculpture, textile, photography and drawing. The overarching theme of her recent works is the investigation into the relationship between the body and Western capitalism. 
www.minnapollanen.com
 
 
Martina Schmücker

In her practice Martina draws on traditions of sculpture, performance and installation. Her sculptural installations are based on existing and imagined architecture. She uses personal memories and dreams of spaces to build these installations,  documenting her investigations of human relations, as well as the relations between possible inhabitants and the constructed spaces.
Martina's performances include the feminist reworking of seminal historic performances such as Site by Robert Morris, as well as moments of still reflection on a sculptural image, using elements of architecture and furniture as props as well as playing with well-known images from art history. Her work has included a construction of the ‘back’ of the painting The pleasure principle by Rene Magritte performed by her German gallerist, the staging of a fight for two hands in Colorfight and Auszeit, an orange box with long legs patiently waiting on a public square in London.
​Martina Schmuecker trained as a cabinetmaker and woodcarver before studying at the University of the Arts Berlin and the Royal College of Art, London. Exhibitions and performances include: In Whose Eyes, Beaconsfield Gellery, London 2018, Colour Block Party, Now Gallery London 2016; Parts and Labour, Osan Museum of Art, Korea, 2014; APT Gallery London 2012; IMMA Dublin Artist Residency 2010; Studio Voltaire Members Exhibition 2012; Malta Contemporary 2009. 

 
Lauren Schneider
Lauren Schneider is a visual artist working mainly with sculpture, fabric, plaster and photography; 
her work has a performative element which is translated through images or text . Lauren's work has become heavily influenced by her studies in psychoanalysis and her own journey to become an analyst. She is particularly inspired by the imagery of her own dream worlds and reproducing these dreams within her sculptural works.
 
NT
NT is a multidisciplinary artist whose work incorporates performance, film, sound, and print. Their work has been shown throughout the UK and internationally. NT’s interests include ‘looking’ and the ‘awareness’ of the gaze, and the aspect of looking whether it is by the artist; the viewer; or the camera lens. As well as the tension that arises from its courtship by the subject, artist, and or lens. NT is also interested in historiography: how history is made and interpreted, and uses appropriation as a means of disruption, re-interpretation, and re-evaluation of the past. 
www.NTpresents.com
 
 
Karis Upton
 
Karis Upton (Norwich, UK) is a self-taught artist, carer and educator. Her work is often guided by the emotive and symbolic in order to render the intuitive visible. Recent work explores the social and personal complexities of living with (and healing beyond) trauma and loss. She is a member of Norwich-based collective, INGRESS.
http://www.karisupton.org
 
 
 
Samiya Younis 
As a contemporary female British Pakistani artist from a South Asian culture, Younis' practice is based around exploring her identity through interdisciplinary modes of construction/de-construction, incitement, provocation exploring tension, material language, research, theory and textile based concern with embodiment in dress. Younis creates paintings, drawings, performance and sculpture, and her works interpret emotions, experiences, tradition and religion. Younis' intentions are to open up and reveal oppressive forces through processes of veiling, rupturing and exposing a hybrid of cultural identities. 

www.samiyayounis.com