Realising international opportunities

P. Staff, Alberta Whittle and Grace Ndiritu respond to five set questions on the subject of​‘Realising international opportunities’.

P. Staff (b. Bognor Regis, UK) received their BA from Goldsmiths College, London and participated in the LUX Associate Artist Programme, London. Staff has presented solo exhibitions at Ordet, Milan (2024); Kunsthalle Basel (2023); Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles (2022); LUMA, Arles (2021); Institute of Contemporary Art, Shanghai (2020); Serpentine Galleries, London (2019). They have been featured in group exhibitions at Del Vaz Projects, Santa Monica (2025); the Whitney Biennial, New York (2024); 59^th Venice Biennale (2022); 13^th Shanghai Biennale (2021); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2019); and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2018).

Alberta Whittle lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland. She received her PhD from Edinburgh College of Art in 2024 and is a current Research Associate at The University of Johannesburg. Whittle represented Scotland at the 59^th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia (2022) and has been the recipient of a Turner Bursary, Frieze Artist Award, and a Henry Moore Foundation Artist Award.

Whittle’s expansive practice encompasses drawing, digital collage, film and video installation, sculpture, performance, and writing. Grounded in research, her work considers historic and contemporary expressions of anti-blackness, colonialism, and migration. Weaving together networks of ancestral knowledge and future possibilities, Whittle explores manifestations of resistance through community, compassion, and collective care.

Her extensive range of exhibitions include solo presentations at Nicola Vassell, New York (2025), Mount Stuart, Isle of Bute (2024), Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2024, with Dominique White); Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2023); Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2023); Holburne Museum, Bath (2023); Scotland + Venice, 59^th Venice Biennale (2022); University of Johannesburg Gallery, Johannesburg (2021); Jupiter Artland, Edinburgh (2021); Glasgow International (2021); Grand Union, Birmingham (2020); and Dundee Contemporary Arts (2019). Selected group exhibitions include Soulscapes, Dulwich Picture Gallery, London (2024); Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance, The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (2023); Soft and weak like water, 14^th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju (2023); British Art Show 9 (2021 – 2022); Moving Bodies, Moving Images, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2022); Black Melancholia, CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson (2022); Sex Ecologies, Kunsthall Trondheim, Norway (2021); and Life between islands: Caribbean British Art 1950s – Now, Tate Britain, London (2021).

Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Advanced Research Centre,
University of Glasgow; Arts Council Collection; Art Gallery of Ontario; The Contemporary Art Research Collection, Edinburgh College of Art; Glasgow Museums Collection; Government Art Collection; The McManus, Dundee; National Galleries of Scotland; and the University of St Andrews.

Grace Ndiritu is a British-Kenyan (Maasai Kikuyu) visual artist, filmmaker and writer whose artworks are concerned with the transformation of our contemporary world. Her work has been featured in Artforum, Art Review, The Guardian, TIME Magazine, The Financial Times, Elephant, BOMB, Mousse, Art Monthly, Metropolis M, Phaidon: The 21^st Century Art Book, Apollo Magazine 40 under 40 list, and BBC Radio 4, Woman’s Hour. She is a recipient of the prestigious Paul Hamlyn Foundation Visual Arts Award (2024).

Her films and videos, textiles, photography, performances, paintings and architectural spaces have been widely exhibited, most recently, in her mid-career survey entitled Healing The Museum at S.M.A.K. Ghent in 2023. Upcoming solo exhibition at Cooper Gallery, Dundee (2025). Other recent solo exhibitions and projects include Page Not Found, The Hague (2025), Kate MacGarry, London (2023), Fotomuseum, Antwerp (2023) and Wellcome Collection, London (2023). Recent group shows include Lyon Biennale (2024), Kettles Yard (2023), Migros, Zurich (2023), Gropius Bau, Berlin (2022), British Art Show (2021 – 2023), Coventry Biennial (2021), Nottingham Contemporary (2021).

Her writing has been published TATE, Migros Museum, Bergen Kunsthall, Whitechapel Gallery: Documents of Contemporary Art, The Paris Review, Le Journal Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, Animal Shelter Journal Semiotext(e) MIT Press, Metropolis M art magazine and Oxford University Press.

Ndiritu is the winner of the Jarman Award in association with Film London (2022). Her award winning films have been screened at international film festivals like the 72^nd Berlinale, FID Marseille and BFI London Film Festival.

Her work is also housed in museum collections such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), LACMA (Los Angeles), Migros Museum of Contemporary Art (Zurich), Foto Museum (Antwerp), The British Council, The Museum of Modern Art (Warsaw) and Arts Council England. As well as private collections such as the King Mohammed VI, Morocco and Walther Collection, New York and Germany.

P. Staff: In some ways, international opportunities or connections, networks or contexts arise the same as any other types of connections: curiosity, willingness, a little bit of recklessness, a dogged commitment to what you do and being part of something, being in community with people. This is an oblique answer I know, but it’s the first step for sure. A base level mindset. I’m seriously shocked at how often I meet artists, curators, arts workers, whatever, who just don’t seem curious about what is out there in the world, you know? Seek out the contexts that reflect your interests, and who cares if it’s for an audience of 10, or 10,000. That’s not the point, you know?

Anyway, a more concrete example might be the first real residency I did, around 2010. I used to be signed up to every possible mailing list that announced opportunities for artists, and I was applying for everything I could at this time – grants, residencies, commissions, projects. There was a residency at the Banff Centre in Canada. I had a crappy temp job in an office where I could basically spend all day writing applications and stealing supplies. I got accepted into the residency, told my temp agency I would be back in a month, apologised to my flatmates and sublet my room in my shared house to some random people from the internet. It was fully funded, which as far as I know Banff doesn’t do anymore. I got there, and was just all in. I went to every seminar, took every studio visit, hung out with everyone I could. There are numerous artists and curators I met on that residency who I collaborated with, or had a romance with, or swapped PDFs with over email for years, or ended up working with ten years later. People I met through that residency invited me on other projects, told me about scenes in other cities, extended invitations to visit them or whatever. I keep in touch with people like a maniac – not a mailing list or announcement of my projects, but a like – hey, can I get a link to that work you mentioned? Do you need a place to crash when you pass through London? Can I put you in touch with that person we talked about? How are you doing? What are you working on? I played in bands for years and this kind of DIY touring spirit bled into how I operate. Find the people doing the shit that excites you. Be generous! Live as cheaply as possibly, be a little irresponsible, be willing to let the world in.

Alberta Whittle: I have always been interested in working in a global way and experiencing different perspectives so since I graduated, I was very focused on following this path. I was very proactive and went to different networking events linked to the British Council, Glasgow International or the Edinburgh Festivals, and I would try and make connections. I applied for so many different residencies and was finally successful and ended up travelling to South Africa and attending residencies at The Bag factory in Johannesburg and Greatmore studios in Cape Town. I learned so much and returned many times, often after fundraising to do performances and make exhibitions with other artists. Through informal networks, sometimes very chance meetings I started establishing these international relationships.

Now, I’d say people reach out more through my website to enquire about new collaborations but some of these relationships/​projects have been years in the making. These cross-cultural/international connections may not ever come into fruition but may lead you down another path in your research and lead you to form relationships and friendships with other people in different cities and countries.

Grace Ndiritu: The best example I have is in 2022 I was invited to do a fellowship with the University of Melbourne and I was invited by Brook Andrew (a friend of mine and aboriginal Australian artist). We had met because we were both in the same exhibition at the Gropius Bau museum in Berlin and had become friends during the conference that took place in the lead up to that show in 2021. In the meantime, he had set up the fellowship that was looking at museum collections, so it made sense, with my project ​‘Healing the Museum’, to take part in it. I was the first fellow which meant that I had a lot of leeway with what I wanted to do in the fellowship (I managed to do a lot of research and travel within Australia, it was my first time there) but also the fellowship was about meeting and working with aboriginal and indigenous communities and Brook knew that I had already been doing that in my own artwork (with the First Nations in Canada and the Mapuche in Argentina). So what happened with the Australian fellowship is that in 2023 I was then invited for a two month fellowship in Svalbard. This was a great residency that allowed me to travel and meet with Sami artists (indigenous people from that region) and during my stay there I decided to work on my ​‘Healing the Museum’ project, but in the form of a novel, writing a novel about museums. And now I just received an awarded residency for 2025 at Cove Park, which is great, where I’ll have the opportunity to hopefully finish the novel that I started two years ago. So you can see that all these residencies and fellowships have been helping each other, because my natural research about indigenous cultures, healing and about museums came together in all three.

P. Staff: A few things: show up to what excites you. Be an audience member, ask a question in Q&A. It’s not always about you. You exist in a community, a context, and the ​“art world” isn’t that big. Apply for everything you can. Just really live it. On the rare instances I go on holiday, I usually end up looking up what public programmes are happening at what museum, or art space, or whatever. Naturally friends will say ​‘oh hey you’re going to Barcelona, check out my friend’s project space, or this cool cinema I went to’. The point is just to see what was out there; you can’t go to every opening expecting to be on a mission to be seen or network or get an opportunity out of it. I know what I’m about to say veers dangerously close to some ​‘law of attraction’ thing, but I really believe in just being sincere and rigorous and committed to your practice and trusting that if it’s good people will find you and you will find your people. Find a way to be secure in yourself. Not arrogant, but internally steady.

I ended up visiting LA because I met another artist on a residency who lived there and said I could crash at her place any time. I went on a holiday there one year, but treated it like a research trip of sorts. The friend took me to all sorts of openings, I met a lot of her friends and whatever, but I also did a lot of my own excursions. I ended up visiting an archive that five years later I proposed to a gallery I make a work about. While I was there making the work, I met some people at a party and started dating someone there. Eventually that turned into moving there. Life and work is messily intertwined. When I first moved to LA, I would casually meet people and be like ​‘oh yeah hey I’m an artist’, and I’d get that sympathetic smile that also signaled they didn’t wanna hear about my work. I knew not to push it, and certainly didn’t want to beg for attention. But it was kind of traumatic, I had been showing a lot in Europe and suddenly was in a context where frankly no one cared. In hindsight, it was good for me, for my ego. At the time it was terrifying. Eventually, I got into a conversation at a party with a friend of a friend of a friend and it turned out this person programmed talks at a small dance space in town, and invited me to be on a panel about love. After that panel discussion, I slowly got studio visits. It’s just a steadfastness.

Alberta Whittle: Although I find social media quite stressful, I think an online profile is really important. And if like me, social media can make you anxious then a comprehensive website is vital. And if you find posting stressful, reaching out to curators or artists you admire can kickstart conversations. It’s important to stay proactive, continue with your applications and not take rejection or slow responses personally.

Grace Ndiritu: I would say that the most important thing for artists to do, to expand their networks is to do residencies, that is number 1, and then obviously doing festivals, exhibitions, talks (a lot of online talks) and travelling. I sacrificed a lot in my 20s, I had gone to art school first in England and then I had known that I had wanted to live abroad so, I had actually got into Goldsmiths, to study textile art, but decided to go to Winchester because I knew I could do an ERASMUS year abroad, so that’s when I already started doing more long term living through a two year residency at De Ateliers in Amsterdam. So my first shows were already international and then I guess it became normal for me to feel comfortable about setting up these networks abroad. This was very different from my friends who had all gone to Goldsmiths, they have ended up living in London for about 20 years. They have a very strong network in the UK, with galleries and museums and things, but they don’t have a network outside. So I’ve been quite lucky in the sense that when the UK funding issues hit, I’ve still got a lot of work going on because I have all of these networks elsewhere and that’s because I gave up and left my comfort zone when I was young, to live and work abroad.

P. Staff: It’s a juggling act of course. You can tell when someone spends more time online or at openings and the afters than they do in the studio, and it’s depressing. I like people who are serious about what they do. Careerism or being fame hungry or just wanting to win at your little petty social hierarchies is an affect that’s really tedious to be around. I struggled all through my 20s because I didn’t really know anyone in the art world, my friends were mostly from other contexts and scenes, I didn’t grow up with a metropolitan cosmopolitan family or education. I used to say to my friends that I wanted to go to more openings, and they’d all roll their eyes. I’d go to one and drink my free glass of wine and think ​‘fuck this why did I even bother coming’. Like I mentioned, I had my crappy temp office job. It was important to me to have enough money to live, but the way I earned it had to be casual so I could be thinking about my practice as much as possible. I really really loved making work, going to shows or screenings or talks or seminars, signing up for stuff. I actually just love art, love to be excited about it, love to talk to people about it. If someone organises a show or performance or whatever and it’s genuinely exciting to me, and I get the chance to tell them I will. Critical distance is great, but at the end of the day, I still get excited to meet someone who wants to just talk about that show they saw recently and how fucking great it was. This to me is the closest thing to nurturing a professional relationship that I can think of. Our industry is extremely porous. Friends have become collaborators, collaborators have become lovers, SOME curators have become friends. My practice is naturally discursive, collaborative, so I’m lucky in that sense. I have to remind myself to focus on just my own stuff, but that’s got easier as I’ve got older. I have friends who spend 12 hours painting and genuinely forget how to talk to people. You have to stay on your toes, catch yourself if you’re losing touch. But yeah, the only times I’ve nurtured a relationship is when I’ve truly just been genuinely curious about someone or excited by the work they’re making and want to hang out basically.

Alberta Whittle: In all honesty, things change all the time. Having a studio manager has been a game changer, as it means you have time to explore your work and do more active thinking. But for a long time, I couldn’t afford this, so I had to be really on it and the hours I worked were just unsustainable. Now I have the headspace to think about the work and be more playful in my studio.

In terms of nurturing professional relationships, it’s always lovely to invite people for studio visits. And re-creating balance I would advise breaking up your day for research, making and admin.

Grace Ndiritu: How do I balance and structure my time? Well that’s complicated because I work in so many different mediums: I work in installation, in film, in performance, in social practice, in architecture, in writing, in painting, in photography…many different mediums, so allowing that structure is a bit more complicated. So I tend to work on many projects at the same time but lots of mediums need different amounts of attention and different preparation times. I usually try to organise my time around deadlines for each project.

Also I lived off grid for about 6 years, so my sense of time did change a lot as well…when you do a lot of residencies as well, your sense of time changes, but, one of the key things I learnt is trying to always to plan in a specific time of year (a few months of the year or a month of the year) where I have some looser less structured time, a kind of sabbatical, or a slower way of thinking, a way to feed my creativity that isn’t about doing shows or deadlines, that’s important.

P. Staff: Probably all of the answers I’ve given so far could come back to community and having a kind of expansive approach to it. Finding your people is important, and that can happen internationally. Being generous, open, and willing is important. For me, there is really no part of my practice or career that has happened in isolation. It has come from natural social groups or scenes, but also from being part of numerous independent study groups, gallery committees, artist advocacy groups, residencies, projects, whatever. I’ve worked for older artists both paid and for free. There is usually not a tangible 2 + 2 = 4 of how a social interaction leads to an opportunity, and it’s not healthy to think that way anyway. When an older mentor died I went to his funeral and saw everyone in the art world scene of the time and realised how small of a community it is. That really struck me, and changed my thinking about how I saw myself as part of an ​‘art world’.

Alberta Whittle: Hugely important – in terms of getting significant critical feedback from your peers but also for informal skill sharing and information sharing. I’ve had friends recommend DoPs, folks who are great with sound, performers and other important roles when I’ve been making films etc, and I’ve done the same for them, so I’ve gained that experience as well. Your peers can also be the people to help make introductions – important intros to curators, other artists and producers.

Grace Ndiritu: Well for a project like COVERSLUT©, that’s my fashion project, it is really embedded in local communities because it’s about fashion and economics. So when I started COVERSLUT© in 2016, I had to find a textile studio that was willing to work with me. I wanted to work with refugees and migrants and also young artists to make the different collections. So I went to live in that type of community in Belgium, to get the brand started. Together we made 5 different collections and it was a really great and a fun project because I got them to do a lot of things that wouldn’t follow the regular fashion calendar, so we would have full moon catwalks instead, or psychedelic movie night, and the clothes were all sold as as ​‘pay what you can’ and the idea was that with that money we would do an ethical collection, which we did, and the clothes were sold online and also in artists bookshops, so it was really a community project. So now I want to restart the brand, but in the UK so I have to start from the beginning in a way, because a lot of people may know about the brand, but unless you have a local community who get invested in it and want to come to the textile studio every week, and to work, it’s an ​‘anti sweat shop’ which means everyone gets paid, it won’t work. So to find the next place I have to network again in general. Whereas with other things, like peer networks, I would say, my book ​‘Being Together: A Manual for Living’ which is about nine experiments that I’ve done with groups of people and was first printed during Covid, in 2021, it was really popular precisely because it kind of inspires people how to build networks and communities and how to be with different types of people. The first edition sold out and then there was this amazing little bookshop in the Hague, called Page not Found (they are a bookshop and an exhibition space). They were obsessed with the book and agreed to republish it this year, in 2025, for my solo show I was doing with them. That was really important and we had to work really hard to achieve that goal, not just to get the money but also some rights issues but we did it, and now the book is available and is hopefully helping other people create new types of community.

P. Staff: I’ve answered this a little bit already, and as much as I have really benefited from community, it’s natural that some of these relationships have drifted, or don’t turn into anything long term. That has happened plenty of times, actually. The British Council sent me and a group of other artists on a career development trip once to East Asia and every curator we met with basically said they were glad to meet but had no interest in work from British artists. I just shrugged and was like ​‘ok, cool, well I got to take a free trip’. The ones that have become long-term are the ones where our natural overlap of interests keep making us end up in the same places, or hitting on the same subjects. Like I mentioned, I naturally keep in touch with people in kind of an annoying way. I had a friend I met on a residency once write to me and be like, your e‑mails are really sweet but I have to admit I don’t really miss people in the same way you do. I had to accept being the golden retriever in that relationship, but we’re still close to this day.

Alberta Whittle: Working with others, for me, is always an opportunity to grow, listen, be vulnerable and learn more about yourself. In any working relationship, it’s also about sharing knowledge with that person so you do try and maintain positive relationships with colleagues, and hopefully they think of you for future opportunities. It shouldn’t always be transactional. Instead, these conversations and relationships are often about curiosity and about growth, listening and seeing where ideas land. There’s never any guarantee the relationship is ever going to go anywhere but you should try and take from what it you can.

Everyone gets busy as do I, and sometimes things go quiet but that is okay.

Grace Ndiritu: The best way to cultivate long term working relationships is you have to be realistic about the distance… It’s like any long distance relationship, you have to put in the effort. For example, in 2014 I did a residency in Argentina. I was obsessed with Patagonia and I was already thinking about wanting to go there and I managed to get this residency in Buenos Aries. I had a great time and then I went back in 2015, I kind of did my own type of residency for two months. I kept in touch with all the people I’d met and all the communities. Then in 2020, just before the pandemic, Arts Catalyst in Sheffield kindly gave me some money along with the British Council Argentina to go back to back to write a script. That script was the script for my film, ​‘Black Beauty’ that won the Jarman in 2022, ..and so you can see that those conversations were kept going over five, six years, and I’m still keeping them going now because I want to go back to Argentina to do more work. So that’s the key, you really have to water and nurture those relationships, over time.