We are thrilled to announce the 4 artists who have been selected for this year’s FACT Together. Each of the awarded artists will receive a grant of £2500, a production budget and 3 months of support to create a new digital artwork.

FACT Together is an annual, online commissioning scheme set up to support early-career artists in the North of England. The scheme launched in 2020, in response to the uncertainty caused to artists and creatives by the Covid-19 pandemic. Following the success of the first edition, FACT Together returns for 2021 as part of our ongoing commitment to online commissioning.

For 2021, we have partnered with guest curator and mentor Zaiba Jabbar of HERVISIONS - a femme focused curatorial agency supporting and promoting new media artists working with emergent technologies at the intersection between art, technology and culture. As a curator whose practice is firmly founded in the production and presentation of online artworks, Zaiba’s experimental approach to digital space will help shape the final FACT Together commissions. As well as being a part of the artist selection panel, Zaiba will work alongside FACT to mentor artists with a focus on creating art in digital spaces.

Erin Dickson

Exploring ideas of home through language, culture and vernacular architecture, Erin Dickson’s practice is connected through tongue-in-cheek themes of ‘Britishness’. Working in the space between craft and digital manufacturing, her work often takes place virtually, processing data to create 3D models and developing systems of correspondence. Through humour, Dickson’s practice softens deliberately provocative subject matter including British class systems, AI bias, intimacy, and isolation.

Her work has been exhibited internationally, most notably in Glasstress at the 2015 and 2017 Venice Biennales. Based in South Shields, Dickson lives and works in the North East.

GLOR1A

GLOR1A is a boundary-defying RNB/ pop artist exploring black futurism and sci-fi through emotive music, technology-laced art and intoxicating live performances. Based in Leeds, she develops dream state worlds for audiences to explore, bridging the gap between music, art, performance and technology. With a successful release of her new EP, METAL in 2021, GLOR1A developed SWARM, a game performance environment like never before. Audiences explore the deep underworld of GLOR1A's thoughts met with live performances in the game: a true collaboration of digital art, gaming and performance.

Kerolaina Linkeviča

Kerolaina Linkeviča (Laīna) was born in Daugavpils, Latvia and migrated to the UK at ten years old and now lives and works in Manchester. Their childhood was deeply rooted in the forest, animism, folk magic and a multiverse of computer games, which inform her multi-disciplinary practice in the UK today. Linkeviča seeks to inspire others to explore their origins, environments and the metamorphic ecologies of their inner worlds through making, questing and play towards the reclamation of agency and enacting of personal transformation. Recent exhibitions and experiences include ‘SPUR' a physical show at D-UNIT, Bristol - Chaosmagic Gallery (Nottingham) X OMSK’s (Berlin) ‘SPUR’ Digital Residency - Ceramics Fellowship (Loughborough University) - STEAMhouse Blender workshops, Eastside Projects (Birmingham).

Hope Strickland

Hope Strickland is an artist-filmmaker and visual anthropologist from Manchester, UK. She is currently concerned with archival response, black feminist thought and postcolonial ecologies, based around a practice rooted in care and collaboration. Hope's work has been screened widely at international film festivals and is included in this year's selection at Open City Documentary Film Festival and the 59th New York Film Festival.

Each of the artists will create a digital artwork that will be shared online from November 2021. The artworks will respond to the themes of FACT’s 2021/22 programme Radical Ancestry: a year-long exploration into the sense of belonging. History, geography, biology and culture all form part of our ancestral story but how does technology help us to explore new ways of thinking and experimenting with who we are? This programme of exhibitions, artworks, projects, residencies and events will bring together artists, activists, young people and local communities to change previous narratives and move towards a more inclusive understanding of what it means to belong.

Sign up to our newsletter or follow us on social media to discover and experience the artworks later this year.

FACT is funded by Arts Council England and Liverpool City Council. FACT Together 2021 is presented in collaboration with Hervisions, supported by The Granada Foundation and The Nora Smith Charitable Settlement.

Header image: Votive Altar (2021), Kerolaina Linkevica. Image courtesy the artist.