Denzil Forrester
Artist Bio
Alberta Whittle
Artist Bio
Zinzi Minott
Artist Bio
Alvaro Barrington
Artist Bio
Tavares Strachan
Artist Bio
Runkus Bennett
Artist Bio
Emelda’s Junction
Artist Bio
Denzil Forrester
Denzil Forrester's vibrant works immortalise the dynamic energy of the London reggae and dub nightclub scene during the early 1980s, a subject that has endured throughout four decades of his practice. Born in Grenada in 1956, Forrester moved to London in 1967. He now lives and works in Cornwall, UK. He received a BA in Fine Art from the Central School of Art, London in 1979 and an MA in Fine Art from the Royal College of Art, London in 1983. He was awarded an MBE in December 2020. Forrester received the Morley Fellowship from Morley College, London in 2019; a Harkness Fellowship in New York in 1986-88; and a scholarship by the British School at Rome in 1983-85.
Pulsating with rhythm, the artist's expressive depictions of dance halls and clubs capture crowds of people moving in unison with the beat of the music. Flashes of vivid colour, gestural brushstrokes and frenetic compositions characterise his work. Forrester explains: “I just wanted to draw movement, action and expression. I was interested in the energy of the crowd, particular dance movements and what the clubbers wore. In these clubs, city life is recreated in essence: sounds, lights, police sirens, bodies pushing and swaying in a smoke-filled room.”
Forrester’s work is currently exhibited in ‘The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure’ at North Carolina Museum of Art, touring from the National Portrait Gallery, London; The Box, Plymouth; and Philadelphia Museum of Art. Major solo exhibitions opened at Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri and Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, Florida in 2023. Forrester was awarded the 2021 South Bank Sky Arts Award for his solo show ‘Itchin & Scratchin’, presented at Nottingham Contemporary and Spike Island, Bristol (2020–2021). A large-scale public artwork for Brixton Underground Station was unveiled by Transport for London in September 2019.
Forrester’s works can be found in many major public collections including: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Tate, UK; Arts Council Collection, UK; Government Art Collection, UK; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and more.
Alberta Whittle
ALBERTA WHITTLE (b. 1980, Bridgetown) lives and works in Glasgow. Whittle’s multifaceted practice is preoccupied with developing a personal response to the legacies of the Atlantic slave trade, unpicking its connections to institutional racism, white supremacy and climate emergency in the present. Against an oppressive political background Whittle aims to foreground hope and engage with different forms of resistance.
In 2025, Whittle presented her solo exhibition 'Towards a loving praxis, we cast seeds into the darkness' at the Nicola Vassell Gallery in New York. In 2024, Whittle presented an exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts Philadelphia with Dominique White, as well as presenting a new solo commission at Mount Stuart, Isle of Bute. In 2023, Whittle produced a major exhibition at Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern One), Edinburgh. She represented Scotland in the 59th Venice Biennale and is a 2022 recipient of the Paul Hamlyn Awards for Artists. In 2020, she was awarded a Turner Bursary and the Frieze Artist Award. She was the Margaret Tait Award winner for 2018/19. Whittle recently received a PhD from the University of Edinburgh. Selected solo exhibitions include: ‘Learning a new punctuation for hope in times of disaster’, Regen Projects, Los Angeles (2024); ‘“Even in the most beautiful place in the world, our breath can falter”., The Modern Institute, Glasgow (2023); ‘Dipping below a waxing moon, the dance claims us for release’, The Holburne Museum, Bath (2023); ‘deep dive (pause) uncoiling memory’, Scotland + Venice, 59th Venice Biennale (2022).
Selected group exhibitions include: 'Black Earth Rising', Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore (2025); 'Soulscapes', Dulwich Picture Gallery, London (2024); ‘Life Between Islands: Caribbean-British Art, 1950s–Now’, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2023); British Art Show 9, touring to Aberdeen Art Gallery, Wolverhampton Art Gallery, and The Box Plymouth (2021-2022); ‘Moving Bodies, Moving Images’, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2022); ‘Twilight Land’, Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2022); ‘Black Melancholia’, CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson (2022); ‘Sex Ecologies’, Kunstall Trondheim, Norway (2021); ‘Life between islands: Caribbean British Art 1950s - Now’, Tate Britain, London (2021); ‘Life Support: Forms of Care in Art and Activism’, Glasgow Women’s Library, Glasgow (2021); and the 13th Havana Biennial, Wilfredo Lam Center, Havana, Cuba (2019).
Zinzi Minott
Zinzi Minott (b. 1986) explores the relationship between bodies and politics, her practice moves between film, sound, sculpture, prints, performance and object based work. She is interested in what it means to have a body, the disruption of lineages and employment of the glitch as a tool to provoke critical reflections of Black Queer life. She is curious about the study of movement, geographically, physically, politically and how this can equip us better to “be together”. Her practice frequently draws on repetition duration and exhaustion as key features or Minotttools to aid discursive enquiry. She is specifically interested in telling Caribbean stories, highlighting the histories of those enslaved during The Atlantic Slave Trade, the resulting migration of The Windrush Generation to the UK and it’s links to contemporary life. She explores cultures around film, sound, sculpture and movement, with a specific interest in Black Sonic production, bass, mixing, remixing, vibration and dark space. She is interested in the temporary building and dismantling of communities which occur in rave spaces, performances, and theaters and what this can teach us about contemporary communities and life.
She is a Trinity Laban conservatoire alum, the first artist trained in dance to be Artist in residence at both Serpentine Gallery (London, UK, 2018) and Tate (London, UK, 2017). She was artist in residence at La Becque 2023, shortlisted for the 9th edition of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women (2023). She was recently nominated for the Live Art award – Shortlist LIVE! 2022 (Finland), received The Continuous commission for 2020-2022 (UK) ,The Jerwood Live Work Award in 2020 (UK), and won The Adrian Howells Award for 2019/2020 (UK).
Her work has been shown at Tate, Baltic, Spike Island, Somerset House, V&A and Wellcome Collection and internationally at Artist Space (USA), Tropenmuseum(AMS), Caribbean Film Festival (USA &TT), Kunsthall (NL), Austland (GER) amongst others.
Alvaro Barrington
Alvaro uses a part of his artist statement in place of a traditional bio:
History doesn’t repeat but it often rhythms
Experience is what you get when you dont get what you want
Faith is for cowards and fools destiny is for what you make of it
We pick desire over nessecity all day long
Its a visually major moment
Remember when is the lowest form of conversation
Front row at the funeral
You gonna die being you
I feel so safe ive found security
Fear campaign
A country called earth
Legalized criminal enterprise
Some of the things im willing to struggle for is the things im going through
Trauma in a people decontextualized over time looks like culture
And in some ways, crypto is a radical experiment in stakeholder capitalism
When the tide goes down you see who have bathing suits on
Instagram
Tavares Strachan
Tavares Strachan’s artistic practice activates the intersections of art, science, and politics, offering uniquely synthesized points of view on the cultural dynamics of scientific knowledge. Aeronautics, astronomy, deep-sea exploration, and extreme climatology are but some of the thematic arenas out of which Strachan creates monumental allegories that tell of cultural displacement, human aspiration, and mortal limitation. Themes of invisibility, displacement, and loss are central to his work, which questions historically canonized narratives that marginalize or obscure others. His text-based neon sculptures are an anthem for our political and cultural moment, and his lexicon an effort to mobilize community and societal change. Strachan’s ambitious, open-ended practice has included collaborations with numerous organizations and institutions across the disciplines.
Strachan was born in 1979 in Nassau, Bahamas, and currently lives and works between New York City and Nassau. He received a BFA in Glass from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2003 and an MFA in Sculpture from Yale University in 2006. He draws on both the resources and community of his birthplace, dividing his time between his studio in New York and Nassau, where he has established an art studio and scientific research platform B.A.S.E.C. (Bahamas Aerospace and Sea Exploration Center). He has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation fellowship in 2022. Strachan’s work has been featured in numerous solo exhibitions including You Belong Here, Prospect 3. Biennial, New Orleans; The Immeasurable Daydream, Biennale de Lyon, Lyon; Polar Eclipse, The Bahamas National Pavilion 55th Venice Biennale, Venice; Seen/Unseen, Undisclosed Exhibition, New York; Orthostatic Tolerance: It Might Not Be Such a Bad Idea if I Never Went Home Again, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge; among others. The Hayward Gallery in London recently featured Strachan in a solo exhibition, titled Tavares Strachan: There Is Light Somewhere in summer 2024.
Runkus Bennett
Romario "Runkus" Bennett is a Jamaican vocalist, producer, and composer whose genre-blurring work is pushing the boundaries of reggae into bold, future-facing territory. A rising force in Caribbean music, his sound —rooted in Rastafari, blends roots, dancehall, soul, and experimental textures—anchored by lyrical depth and a fearless sonic vision. Born into reggae lineage but not bound by it, the Jamaican artist-producer has become one of the island’s most arresting voices: a sharp lyricist, versatile performer, and a sonic architect with vision far beyond category.
In 2021, Runkus released IN:SIDE, a quarantine-inspired LP distributed by Delicious Vinyl. It was named one of Reggaeville’s Albums of the Year. In the wake of IN:SIDE LP, Runkus, alongside Oscar Nominated producer Toddla T, began crafting The OUT:SIDE LP—a layered, future-forward body of work that explores collective exile, ecstatic joy, and the spiritual texture of diasporic life. This project was placed on Rolling Stone’s Albums of the Year for 2022.
A two-time Grammy nominated artist, Runkus has contributed to some of reggae’s most acclaimed works: “Like Dat” on Jesse Royal’s Royal (Grammy-nominated) – writer, performer, producer, engineer;“Truths & Rights” feat. Mortimer on Protoje’s A Matter of Time (Grammy-nominated) – writer; “Armageddon” on The Skints’ Swimming Lessons – co-writer; “Note to Self (Be Okay)” and “Highly (Get to Me)” on Jah9’s Note to Self – co-producer with Iotosh.
Runkus has also worked with members of the Marley family, including touring with Ky-Mani Marley. In 2025, he earned a JUNO nomination for Reggae Recording of the Year and contributed production to BASHY, winner of MOBO’s Album of the Year.
His sonic vision also extends into contemporary art through a deep collaboration with renowned Bahamian artist Tavares Strachan. Together, they co-created sound installations for major exhibitions at the Hayward Gallery in London, Marian Goodman Gallery in New York, and the Supernovas exhibition at Kunsthalle Mannheim in Germany. The Supernovas exhibition now titles his forthcoming album.
Emelda’s Junction
Alvaro Barrington Studio’s musical program Emelda's Junction with Errol and Alex Rita's Touching Bass will curate musical activations throughout the week, celebrating soca, calypso, reggae and the wider musical legacy of the Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora. The lineups celebrate the richness and rhythm embedded in Caribbean music culture. Emelda’s Junction launched at Notting Hill Carnival in 2022 and continues to organise concerts and parties.
Beautiful Collisions will close on Saturday 7 June when Emelda’s Junction meets Touching Bass. Join us between 12.30 and 18.00 for sets from Amber Simone, Mangrove Steel Band, Roxanne Tataei, Sandra Cross Choir, Sylvia
Tella, curated by Errol, Alex Rita and Alvaro Barrington Studio, powered by Friendly Pressure.
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