Contemporaries: Mavernie Cunningham and Erica Scourti

Contemporaries is a series of talks presented by the Critical and Contextual Studies (CCS) teaching programme in Fine Art, Photography and Fashion Photography. In each event, two artists speak about the ideas and questions that animate their work. The conversation that follows invites students, tutors and speakers to open up a space of relation between these ideas, in search for common problems and wider themes in contemporary art practice.

Mavernie Cunningham is the newly appointed Head of Art at the School of Art, Architecture and Design, LondonMet. Mavernie has worked across a range of disciples throughout her career and her practice has included painting, drawing, ceramics, spoken word, improvised vocals and printmaking. She has contributed chapters on Frantz Fanon and Georges Didi-Huberman for Routledge’s Fifty Key Texts in Art History (ed. Pooke and Newell, 2012). More recently her auto ethnographic artistic practice and research asks questions of her cultural identity and representation.

She currently works with Chris Hunt developing pieces that include performance, film and sound that engage a sense of personal history, memories of childhood and stories from Jamaica and her family’s migrations. Mavernie’s collaborative work builds on distinct starting points bringing together unexpected connections to explore what are the intersections of history, storytelling and reflections on identity in contemporary life.

Erica Scourti is an artist and writer, based in Athens and London. She has performed, exhibited and presented talks internationally, at High Line New York, Wellcome Collection, Kunsthalle Wien, Hayward Gallery, Munich Kunstverein, ICA London and EMST Athens, the 7th Athens Biennale: ECLIPSE and Survival Kit 13, Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art (2022). Her writing has been published in Spells (Ignota, 2018) and Fiction as Method (Sternberg, 2017) amongst others, and she guest-edited the Happy Hypocrite – Silver Bandage journal (2019).  She is undertaking a PhD in Goldsmiths’ Art Department, and is a Lecturer in BA Fine Art at Central St Martins.

Contemporaries is open to students from all disciplines at the School of Art, Architecture and Design. The series is curated by the CCS teaching team in Art – Ania Dabrowska, Aikaterini Gegisian, Tommaso Gorla, Joseph Kohlmaier, Matilda Moors, Trevor Norris, and Frank Wasser.