University News Last updated 03 December 2019
Birmingham School of Art and Eastside Projects are delighted to announce artist Harun Morrison as the winner of the Wheatley Fine Art Fellowship.
The £9,000 tax-free stipend fellowship is intended to give a practitioner time and resources to develop new work and ideas alongside staff and students at Birmingham City University’s prestigious Birmingham School of Art.
Harun will be provided with a studio at the School and access to extensive facilities and expertise across the faculty. The Fellowship will connect with Eastside Projects and develop, with curatorial support and options for events across the year, towards a solo exhibition with Eastside Projects in their Second Gallery space in September 2020.
In the second semester, which runs between January and May, Harun will work with a group of second year undergraduate students on a project negotiated between him and staff at the School alongside some tutorial support.
The Fellowship has been created by Birmingham City University in conjunction with the Trustees of the Wheatley Estate and is the outcome of a generous bequest by the late Richard Wheatley.
Harun Morrison is an artist and writer currently living on a narrow boat on Regent’s Canal. Alongside Helen Walker, he co-founded the collective art practice ‘They Are Here’ in 2006. Through this collaboration they continuously explore group dynamics, questions of authorship and politics of visibility. Recent commissions include I’ll Bring You Flowers (2019) Survival Kit 10, Riga, Laughing Matter (2018) at Studio Voltaire, the performance 40 Temps, 8 Days (2017) at Tate Modern and Beacon Garden (2018 - 2020), a co-design commission and community build project in Dagenham, East London at the invitation of Create London.. Since 2019 Harun has been a trustee of the Black Cultural Archive (est.1981). He has an MA in Critical Writing from Chelsea College of Art and Design. He is currently artist-in-residence with Arts Catalyst and previously in residence at IASPIS and Botyrka Konsthall, Stockholm (2018). Forthcoming work will be shown in Bamako Biennial, Mali (2019) and Dakar Biennial, Senegal (2020). Harun has been a visiting lecturer at Central St Martins, Goldsmiths and the Royal College of Art and is associate faculty for the new studio program Conditions in Croydon. Harun will mark the commencement of his fellowship by making and documenting a journey on his boat, Zoar, from London to Birmingham via the Grand Union Canal.
Credit: Photo by Indre Neiberkaite. Edible Intervention by Magda Fabianczyk / Precarity Centre, They Are Here (2018)