Somerset House Studios resident

Imran Perretta

Encompassing moving-image, sound, performance and poetry, Imran Perretta makes work about power.

Somerset House Studios

New Wing

Underpinning Imran's practice are questions around alterity, neo-coloniality and the process of identity forming in a post-9/11 era characterised by austerity, state-sponsored Islamophobia and the War on Terror.

Imran was named a Turner Prize Bursary winner in 2020 and was a recipient of a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Artist Award in 2023. He was also nominated for the Jarman Award in 2019 and was a winner of the Jerwood/FVU award in 2017/18. Recent exhibitions, screenings and performances include: tears of the fatherland, Secession, Vienna (2024), The Condition of Being Addressable, ICA LA (2022), SUROOR for CTM Festival, Berlin and Whitechapel Gallery, London (2022), the destructors, Spike Island, Bristol, Chisenhale Gallery, London, the Whitworth, Manchester and BALTIC, Gateshead (2020-21) and Rotterdam International Film Festival; AMRA (in collaboration with Paul Purgas) for Art Night London, (2020-21).

‘Perretta’s work [is] concerned with embodied representations…a critique of minimalist infatuation with ‘pure’ aesthetic statement[s] made at the expense of considering the provenance of materials and the industrial systems of oppression of which they are part…’

Art Monthly

Imran Perretta has been a resident at Somerset House Studios since 2017, in which time he has engaged in various projects. In 2018, he curated The Listening Party, hosting events on the influences of sonic and visual cultures on British South-Asian artists. Perretta’s ongoing audiovisual collaboration with Paul Purgas, AMRA, debuted at Assembly in 2018, with the duo also presenting new work for Art Night 2021.

Perretta’s R&D project Migrant Agency & The Moving Image as part of a Somerset House Studios and King’s College London partnership informed 2018’s commission 15 Days for the Jerwood/FVU Award, a film examining the dehumanisation of refugees in Calais. Imran also presented video work DESH at group exhibition Bonds in the Studios’ G31 project space, and recently participated in The Artists’ Fair, on a panel discussing the challenges of balancing parenthood and artistic practice.