Birmingham Museums Trust announces multi-disciplinary artist Christopher Samuel as resident artist for its 20/20 project.

The Trust is one of 20 UK public collections selected to work with a resident emerging artist as part of a major UK-wide commissioning programme that directly invests in the careers of a new generation of ethnically diverse artists.

20/20 is an ambitious three-year project launched in November 2021 by University of the Arts London (UAL) Decolonising Arts Institute, working in partnership with UK public collections, museums and galleries, and supported by funding from Freelands Foundation, Arts Council England’s National Lottery Project Grants Programme and UAL. 

The project was conceived in response to urgent calls for action within arts and culture in the wake of Black Lives Matter, as social inequities and racial injustices continued to be amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Christopher will undertake a 15-month paid residency which will lead to the production of a commissioned artwork that will enter the city’s permanent collection. His work is rooted in identity and disability politics, often echoing the many facets of his own lived experience.

Seeking to interrogate his personal understanding of identity as a disabled person impacted by inequality and marginalisation, Christopher responds with urgency, humour, and poetic subversiveness within his work. This approach makes his work accessible to a wider audience, allowing others to identify and relate to a wider spectrum of human experience.

Christopher’s previous projects include The Archive of An Unseen, which features fragments of the artist’s life story, growing up black, disabled and working class in the 1980s, in an interactive artwork. Layers of audio, video and photography form what he describes as an “expanded documentary” of his life. These are presented in a custom-built re-creation of a Microform reader – a viewing instrument usually operated by specialists – echoing the medical scrutiny he experienced as a child.

Among the museums and galleries across the country to receive a 20/20 project residency are Coventry’s Herbert Art Gallery and Museum and Wolverhampton Art Gallery.

For more information, visit: birminghammuseums.org.uk