Five Innovators & Pathbreakers for Talent 25
For Somerset House’s milestone 25th birthday year, learn more about the first five makers supported via our new initiative, Talent 25.
Our central London site is a marker for the ways in which London changes over time – our network of neoclassical buildings have a storied past, dating back to the 1500s – and, at the turn of the 21st Century, Somerset House was little more than a carpark and a suite of government offices. Page on twenty-five years, and the building has undergone a radical transformation to grow into the unrivalled centre for cultural innovators and internationally acclaimed arts destination it is known as today.
To mark our 25th birthday year, multidisciplinary artist and designer Yinka Ilori helms a brand-new initiative, Talent 25, which expands upon Somerset House’s existing and ongoing commitment to investing in creative potential. The year-long scheme – aided by an industry-leading panel – spotlights five innovative gamechangers from across Somerset House’s creative community, providing them with financial and professional developmental support to ensure the vital and urgent work they undertake from their base here at Somerset House continues to develop and thrive, push boundaries and provoke change.
“Somerset House has played a pivotal role in my creative journey, offering a platform that nurtures innovation and amplifies voices that might otherwise go unheard. I'm proud to support Talent 25, an initiative that reflects Somerset House’s ongoing commitment to fostering the next generation of forward-thinking talent. This is about opening opportunities for cultural pioneers to thrive and providing the support needed to turn ideas into impactful work. Together, we’re building pathways for the future of creativity.”
Yinka Ilori
Drawn from across the various strands of Somerset House’s diverse and ever-active community – including Somerset House Studios, Makerversity, Black Business Residency (sponsored by Morgan Stanley with additional support from M&C Saatchi) and Somerset House Exchange – learn more about the five artists celebrated by the Talent 25 programme below.
“Talent 25 encapsulates what we do at Somerset House with our talent development programmes: nurturing the next generation of innovators and empowering underrepresented talent, providing them with the platform and support needed to thrive in the creative industry. These worthy recipients are the future of creativity and I can’t wait to see what they do next.”
Pooja Sitpura, Head of Inclusive Talent Engagement at Somerset House
Enorê
Somerset House Studios
Based within Somerset House Studios, enorê is a visual artist working with digital and material practices to examine the entanglements between virtuality and physical embodiment.
Primarily working with 3D printed ceramics, they use clay as a catalyst to question how digital data can be mediated through physical processes, with an interest in clay’s potentiality as a pervasive and highly temporal material. This is developed by exploring the fluidity between multiple realms, not only limited to physical or digital, and observing the shapes that the translations between these systems take. The reconfiguration of the virtual data body, now stripped of its flesh, into physical existence in clay, points to a new type of matter: existing between the slippery gaps of translation, between virtual and physical, tangible and ethereal.
Recent exhibitions include Poetics of Encryption at KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin), Points of Return at Somerset House Studios (London), and PIPA Prize (Rio de Janeiro) where they were a 2024 prize awardee. Recent commissions include Meta Open Arts, Contemporary And (C&), and The Public Statues and Sculpture Association (PSSA). They have previously facilitated workshops at the Victoria & Albert Museum, York Art Gallery, and South London Gallery, and currently teach on the BA Fine Arts programme at Kingston University.
Identity 2.0
Somerset House Exchange
Working within Somerset House Exchange, Identity 2.0 is an interdisciplinary art project co-founded by Arda Awais & Savena Surana whose work focuses on making the concept of digital identity accessible and engaging for a broad audience. A creative studio imagining better digital futures, Awais & Surana’s work tells different stories about our relationship to technology, transforming research into creative mediums and develop playful knowledge spaces.
Working amongst partners, they shape exciting but important stories about technology alongside their studio work. They have a unique blend of creative skills and technology knowledge, allowing them to work easily with creatives and techies alike.
Identity 2.0 is absolutely unique in their dedication to research and art at the intersection of race and technology. I can't think of any other artist collective doing the kind of work Identity 2.0 does. Their work builds on and meticulously references scholarly work in this area, while simultaneously distilling it for public audiences and providing new insights.
P.M. Krafft, PhD (they/them), Senior Lecturer & Course Leader, University of Arts London Creative Computing Institute
Their interdisciplinary work has spanned exhibitions, printed zines, workshops and digital experiences. They have worked with Stop Killer Robots, Feminist Internet and the Goethe Institut and have spoken around the world about their experiences, including at the University of Oxford and World Web Foundation.
Identity 2.0 projects have received praise from Mozilla, AccessNow and Kevin Roose and they have also been named #WebChampions by Tim Berners-Lee and selected for the first DesignKind programme by the British Council and Pentagram.
Arda Awais is an award winning multidisciplinary designer and creative technologist with expertise in User Experience Design. Previously, she worked for clients such as Tate, Dove, and Soho House. She has received the BIMA 100 award in the creators and designers category and was selected to be a Design Council expert to work on projects accelerating the #DesignforPlanet mission.
Savena Surana (she/her) is a creative producer, strategist, and artist who is focused on telling stories for good. She has worked with the Mastercard Foundation, Westminster Forum of Democracy, and Careful Trouble. She is also the program manager at the micro-grants charity Grand Plan and recently completed a year-long program as an associate board member for Abandon Normal Devices.
Piarvé Wetshi
Black Business Residency
Working within our Black Business Residency programme, Priarvé Wetshi is the co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of Colèchi, a Black-owned collective and research agency and collective actioning sustainable development across the fashion industry and consumer landscapes.
Wetshi is also the co-founder of Last Yarn, a marketplace reselling surplus fabric, and takes this dedication to reducing textile waste into the core of her projects. She has made it on the Elle UK's Green List 2024 and Vogue Business 100 Innovators 2024 list.
Shanti Bell
Makerversity
Shanti Bell is a multidisciplinary artist based in London, creating experiential sculpture. By making work that is interactive, immersive, and wearable, her practice seeks to explore the relationship and overlap between sculpture and the human form. Her sculptural work is primarily in the medium of wood and fabric, where they sculpt and design pieces in synergy with the human body, personifying objects and injecting life into the inanimate.
Shanti has collaborated with a range of different disciplines and practitioners which is a crucial part of pushing the boundaries of her creative outcomes and previous collaborations have led to work with drummers, skateboarders, movement directors, musicians, poets, and dancers.
Shanti completed an MA in Fashion at the Royal College of Art, supported with a scholarship from both the RCA and the British Fashion Council. Past works have seen Shanti collaborate with a range of different creatives and platforms such as Bianca Saunders, BOLD Agency & Somerset House, Wayne McGregor & The Royal Opera House, the record label 4AD, Bridgerton x The British Fashion Council, and The Design Museum and has been featured in various publications such as Vogue, System Magazine, Revue Magazine, 1 Granary and AnOther Magazine. Most recently, Shanti had a solo show titled The Room that Shared with the curatorial platform MAMA, and was awarded the Black British Artist Grant by Samuel Ross.
Tyreis Holder
Somerset House Studios
Tyreis Holder is an Artist, Poet, Visual Storyteller and Community arts practitioner from South London, with heritage reigning from Jamaica / St Vincent. She works heavily in mediums pertaining to installation, textiles, performance, poetry, sculpture and sound, and her practice centres around explorations of self, identity politics, generational and ancestral healing, spirituality, and the relationship with the mind, particularly within regards to navigating colonial spaces.
Primary grounds for exploration pertain to how textiles pose as poetic language – functioning as a healing device – and specifically in regards to trauma experienced by black women. Bringing lived experiences into her practice, she aims to generate conversations around how social and intimate spaces are shaped through race, diffability, community, heritage, class, sexuality and culture.
Throughout 2025, Somerset House will platform and champion these practitioners – showcasing their work across multiple outlets – and audiences will have an opportunity to see the work of the Talent 25 creatives as part of Somerset House’s Step Inside 25 weekend in September: a free, open-to-all invitation for audiences to celebrate Somerset House’s milestone year.
Talent 25 Nominees:
BBR
Amanda Boachie - Fourty Four Words
Jasmine Richards - Storymix
Marlon James-Edwards - Artcha Series
Nadina Ali - Nadina Did This
Inclusive Talent Engagement
Catherine Morton-Abuah
Di'mond Sharma-Joseph
Makerversity
Alex Park - Biofonic
Ana Cordoba Crespo
Kerrie O'Leary
Louis Barrett
Somerset House Exchange
April Koyejo-Audiger
Shama Rahman - NeuroCreate
Yi Wang - Queer East
Zarina Muhammad - The White Pube
Somerset House Studios
Kadeem Oak
Leila Dear
Louis Morlae
Shenece Oretha