Tamsyn Challenger is a multi-disciplinary artist, curator and lecturer.
Since 2010 her work has sought to question wide ranging gender and socio-political ideas including precursor work on selfie culture within social media, truth and identity. As an artist working independently of the major galleries she’s been in the Guardian’s ‘Top 5 Exhibitions list’ twice in ten years, once with ‘400 Women’ and again in 2018 with her first curation, ‘Free The Pussy!’.
She's regularly invited to speak at universities and festivals including the WOW Festival, Stoke Newington Lit Fest, UAL, Glasgow, Oxford and Cambridge Universities. In 2017 Challenger was asked to deliver the David Vilaseca Public Memorial Lecture by Royal Holloway University. A podcast and transcript of the lecture ‘On Truth’ is available here. Post the lecture she was appointed a member of the Advisory Committee of the Centre for Visual Cultures at Royal Holloway University.
Her gender-political work '400 Women' took five years to create and addressed issues of mortality and the capacity of art to imagine the dead, sexual violence and trauma. Challenger’s central aim was to re-personalise the individual from the statistic. The ‘400’ exhibition opened in 2010 at a site-specific space in East London and the installation went on to feature on BBC 2’s Review Show, Mexico TV, Nieuwsuur in the Netherlands and continues to be written about internationally.
Between 2012-13 she was in residence at Beaconsfield Contemporary in Vauxhall where she developed the installation 'Monoculture'. The work explored the 'selfie' portrait, sexuality and self-representation in an age of social media tying it to the effects of cultural homogeneity. She drew parallels with the hidden controls imposed on a so-called free environment like the Internet by conflating these ideas with so-called 'cash crops' and CCD (colony collapse disorder) in bee colonies. This work was recommended by the Contemporary Art Society and described in the New Scientist as 'mesmerising and horrifying in equal measure'. It was shown again with the Edinburgh Art Festival in 2014 with new performance work ‘Twitter Chorus’.
‘Twitter Chorus' was a further development of the ideas behind 'Monoculture' and was voiced for the first time in England in 2015 at the Southbank Centre for Web We Want. It has subsequently been performed at the New Hall Art Collection, MEC, Cambridge University with renowned anarchic performance group Gaggle and Fabrica, Brighton. In March 2016 this work was staged on a dramatic scale with hundreds of voices from multiple choirs as part of the Chorus Festival, Southbank Centre.
Between 2016 and 2021 she was a supported artist at Summerhall in Edinburgh where she created various works - ‘HYPER BOWL’ developed and shown for their visual art festival programme 2016, and written up in the Times as 'the paramount, walk-in art for the age of Trump'. And In 2018 she curated her first exhibition there which sprang from her previous association with 'Pussy Riot'. It aimed to be a celebration of visual artists’ ability and capacity for protest. The ‘Free The Pussy!’ exhibition was mostly made up of archive work from 2012 when the 'Riot' sent out a call to arms to the creative community. Some of this work was also featured in the Rough Trade book 'Let's Start a Pussy Riot'. Artists featured in the exhibition - No Bra, Judy Chicago, Tamsyn Challenger, Billy Chyldish, Gaggle, Gera (Nadya Tolokonnikova’s daughter), The Gluts, Hayley Newman, Yoko Ono, Miss Pokeno, Pussy Riot, Jamie Reid, John Keane, Layla Sailor, Wendy Saunders, Carolee Schneemann and Voina. Upon opening, it went to the top of the Guardian's Top 5 National Exhibitions list and stayed in the line up for three weeks. It was featured on BBC Scotland with the Pussy Riot collective and BBC Edinburgh Nights. Interviews appeared in Studio International, LA Review of Books, The List, The National, The Scotsman and others.
Challenger’s work has been documented in various journals and publications including the Beaconsfield History 'Chronic Epoch' and the protest book 'Let's Start a Pussy Riot' . The latter was published in 2013 by Rough Trade Records in collaboration with 'Pussy Riot' and four London-based feminist collectives to raise funds for the trial of ‘Pussy Riot’ members in Russia.
In 2022 the sculpture ‘Ducking Stool’ made for the ‘Let’s Start a Pussy Riot’ book went on permanent loan at Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens in Cornwall.
She has made documentary for the BBC including ‘My Male Muse’ which was Radio 4’s Pick of the Year in 2007. Her writing has appeared in Garageland Magazine and under a pseudonym in ‘Adjacent Pineapple’.
She is currently collaborating on a number of new projects. More news soon.