Reach me through
- Twitter @angelaytchan
- My project specific contacts (see below)
My main projects are
- Worm: art + ecology
- My research-based arts practice
- London Chinese Science Fiction Group and London Science Fiction Research Community (LSFRC)
Current:
- I reject Festival UK* 2022 and have signed Migrants in Culture's Open Letter against the 'Brexit Festival', which carries the UK Government's racist, anti-immigrant nationalism. I believe it is a violent misuse of £120m in public funds during this pandemic.
I encourage you to please read, sign and share. - Sharing thoughts on this panel organised by System of Systems with Arts Catalyst
- Curated "Climate and Culture Beyond Borders", my online Cover Collaboration for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art's November journal issue of British Art Studies. See more here and my curatorial statement
- Beginning my FACT / Jerwoord Arts Digital Fellowship - I'll be developing my own research-based art project on UK water scarcity framings and citizen climate knowledges
Image: Angela Chan
Worm: art + ecology
Since 2014, I have independently worked on Worm: art +ecology (wormworm.org), a long-term curatorial project
that communicates climate change issues through contemporary art and creative practices.
Through this, I produce online and gallery exhibitions, interviews with practitioners and
also deliver public workshops and talks focused on intersectional climate justice issues.
Worm: art + ecology strives to challenge the criteria for climate change expertise,
to encourage accessible and inclusive approaches to these issues, and forefront
perspectives that are systemically marginalised from both the mainstream environmental and arts conversations.
It is continually developing, with the aim to hold space for a growing global network of creative
practices focused on climate issues.
I have curated funded gallery and online group exhibitions as Worm: art + ecology:
- Climate and Culture Beyond Borders for British Art Studies with my curatorial statement here, (2020)
- Climate Knowledges, Rotterdam, (2020)
- Refuse: (v)(n)(-), online, (2018)
- Tipping Points, Oslo, (2016)
Moving image: Worm: art + ecology logo by Al Walker
Art practice
My art making practice centres climate knowledges and communication through
co-learning anti-colonial climate narratives. It emphasises inclusive participation in everyday
local and global climate activism, challenging the systemic structures of climate
knowledge discourses (colonial histories, imperialist sciences). My work
includes video recordings (with an interest in environmental remote sensing technologies), drawings, collaborative interviews, and speculative
fiction writing as modes of representing bodies of research.
I am part of the year-long Myco-Lective artist development programme through Chisenhale Gallery,
thinking about interspecies futures with other practitioners.
Currently, I am developing a project titled "Moss Rain Paradox", which critiques
the language and climate communication methods of the UK’s 2020 Environmental Agency report,
"Great British Rain Paradox" on our imminent water scarcity. I also explore alternative
climate communication strategies that recentre marginalised experiences of climate impacts
in the UK. My project is supported by the FACT and
Jerwood Arts' Digital Fellowship.
For 2021, I am a commissioned artist for Estuary 2021 and will create a public art project on my
research into the international environmental and humanitarian legacies of the former Pitsea Explosives Factory. I will also join
Sonic Acts'
OVEREXPOSED as an environmental research resident, with my focus on tear gas as a long-term environmental pollutant within the cycles of climate
and social injustice, protest and state sanctioned humanitarian and environmental violence worldwide.
Image: Mapping Moss (2020) by Angela Chan
London Chinese Science Fiction Group
科幻研究在伦敦
I work actively with science and speculative fiction through literature and art,
collaborating with authors, translators and editors worldwide.
Co-founding the London Chinese Science Fiction
Group (LCSFG) (April 2019), I co-curate our programme of translated readings and organise the
monthly discussion meetings hosted at UCL, now online, where we facilitate for our readers to discuss
the stories together with the authors and translators.
London Science Fiction Research Community (LSFRC)
I also co-direct the London Science Fiction Research Community (LSFRC). This year’s LSFRC theme for our monthly reading group and annual conference is Activism & Resistance.
Publication and writing
My writing is published in
Science Fiction (2020, MIT Press and Whitechapel Gallery), and I have
written about SF and interviewed science fiction authors for
Dream Babes Zine 2.0 (PSS) and for filmmaker
Cao Fei's exhibition (Serpentine Gallery).
I have presented a paper, Climate Change and Contemporary Chinese Science and Speculative Fiction:
Invisible, Extractive and Uneven Boundaries, that situates Chinese climate SF within
the geopolitics of climate change for LSFRC's
Beyond Borders: Empires, Bodies, Science Fictions conference, as well as the livestreamed and recorded
Hybrid Conference for FIBER Festival. Listen back here
I am also a new co-editor of BERSERKER,
a journal of genre studies, outlandish comics, and science fiction published by Breakdown Press.
Image: Cover of the publication Science Fiction (2020, MIT Press and Whitechapel Gallery)
Other collaborations
I am working collaboratively with Obsidian Coast’s year-long
Hypericum Working Group. It is a 'research project developing a collectively produced,
ever-evolving code of practice for feminist, antiracist, anticolonial and environmentally
sustainable arts organising'. This will foreground marginalised cultural workers to challenge
the uneven working environments within arts institutions and elsewhere in the sector.
For 2020, I am part of Rotterdam art gallery MAMA's 'Poule of Programme Makers' and we curated a
week-long programme
Gentle Strategising with local creative activist groups.
I also research for other artists' projects, notably climate science research for the
Otolith Group's film,
INFINITY Minus Infinity (2020), in which I also feature.
I'm interested in collaborating with others on climate and social justice issues beyond the arts. Here's
my summary for NüVoices, an international female and non-binary collective researching on China, and
their panel on gender and climate change.
Image: Moss microscope still by Angela Chan
Alongside diverse public workshop facilitations through gallery and museum programming, I also work
with youth groups (aged 14-19) on longer projects about creative and intersectional perspectives
on climate change. I deliver workshop series that introduce the colonial histories of
climate change and encourage wider and connecting discussions on racial, social and youth
activisms across climate justice activities.
Image: Illustration by Immy Perryman for the RawMinds Ambassadors' event with the Wellcome Collection.
I regularly give public talks as part of museum
and gallery exhibition programming, as well as conferences related to the climate, environmental,
technology and literary sectors.
My teaching experience covers intersectional climate arts, creative climate communication, climate
change's colonial history and race, climate science fiction and sinophone science fiction.
Image: My talk at Somerset House for Earth Day 2018
All exhibitions have been fully funded, thanks to:
Image: Angela's moss and green screen nails, bts filming with Otolith Group 2019
I work freelance on these projects and am open to freelance and other opportunities in the cultural, environmental,
educational and literary sectors. I have previously worked at climate and arts charities and organisations including Julie's Bicycle, Cape Farewell, and both the Estates
and Learning and Exhibitions departments at the V&A Museum, as well as in an sustainable architecture studio in Shanghai.
Workshops
I also navigate with young people how worldbuilding through science and speculative fiction could bring inclusive storytelling,
as an exciting way to create their own climate narratives that speak to their imagined futures.
Youth groups I have worked with include the
Art Assassins at South London Gallery (Summer 2019)
who self-directed their own
comic book project, and the
RawMinds Ambassadors at Wellcome Collection (April - September 2020),
who organised a
webinar event with invited speakers for other 14-19 year olds, to explore the globally uneven climate impacts of food,
‘sustainable’ fashion and futures.
Talks
Some institutions I have spoken at include ICA London, Stuart Hall Library / Iniva, Barbican, Barber Institute,
Somerset House, V&A Museum, Google HQ London and many others.
I enjoy participating with grassroots arts and activism groups. I have spoken at events organised
by daikon* and Mother Tongues, and have also appeared on radio shows on stations like Resonance FM and Montez Press Radio.
Teaching
Recent lectures for undergraduate and postgraduate courses include, Architecture Association (AA), Falmouth
University, CIEE and University of Kent.
Residencies
Awards
Independent Research
Worm: art + ecology
Academic
CV and portfolio available upon request.
Web design by Angela Chan