Van Gogh House London

Van Gogh House and Minerva are pleased to announce the residents for the first edition of the Minerva Residency: Roy Claire Potter and Lilian Nejatpour.

The Minerva Residency is an opportunity for two creative practitioners, an artist and a writer, to spend the month of August living and developing their practice in Van Gogh House, in line with our mission of supporting artists within their lifetimes.

Residencies at the house provide the opportunity for artists to sleep in Vincent or his sister Anna’s former bedrooms and work in the garden studio or reading salon. Artists are encouraged to respond to the wide ranging themes that intersect the house, from Vincent’s time here, to questions around identity, heritage, materiality and urbanism. 

The Minerva Residents are chosen from a shortlist of nominations made by academic staff on arts and writing courses in the UK. By process of nomination from the university network The Minerva Residency strives to support practicing artists and writers who are teaching, graduating and researching within it.

Born in Merseyside and living in West Yorkshire, Roy Claire Potter makes performance and experimental art writing. Much of their approach to making visual, auditory or written artworks is influenced by pragmatic linguistic theory—how physical and social contexts contribute to intended or received meaning. This is extended to audience encounters with ‘voice’ across staged and improvised performance, installation, broadcast and audio or print publication. Their narrative works are iteratively produced, across form, over long periods of time and address subjects such as domestic sound, bodily comportment, spatial and group dynamics with a focus on interpersonal communication and violent affect.

Potter’s work has been commissioned by Radiophrenia (2020), Reduced Listening for BBC Radio 3 (2020), Tate Britain and Tate Publishing (2019) and Electra Productions (2018). They have recently exhibited at Palazzo Malipiero (Venice, 2021), OUTPUT Gallery (Liverpool, 2019), IMT Gallery (London, 2018/19) and have presented works with Art Verona (2020), Collecteurs (New York, 2020) and Artissima (Turin, 2019). 

Potter is the author of two books of experimental fiction, Mental Furniture (VerySmallKitchen, 2014) and Round That Way (Ma Bibliotheque, 2017) and has contributed to numerous exhibition catalogues and literary anthologies. Collaborative and solo audio works have been released by Chocolate Monk (Brighton, 2017/18), Sub Rosa (Belgium, 2019) and FortEvilFruit (Cork, 2015/18) — a new vinyl release with South Korean composer Park Jiha is forthcoming with Cafe OTO in 2021. They are Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Liverpool John Moores University and are represented by A+A Gallery in Venice, where they will present new work in 2022.

Lilian Nejatpour is a British-Iranian artist who shifts between making sculptural forms and sound structures. She often investigates displacement and duality through her unique settings and experiences. With influences taken from Southern Iran to her northern background in bassline music from Bradford, much of her work is a dialogue between performance, sound, and theory. She questions how these distinct modes operate alongside one another and what problems arise when captured and re-situated in discourse.

Lilian represented Iran as an artist in residence for the cultural exchange between TADAEX (Tehran’s Annual Digital Arts Festival) in 2016 and NODE Forum for the Digital Arts (Frankfurt) in 2017.  From 2017-2019, Nejatpour was a studio resident at Somerset House in London, under the mentorship of Turner-prize winner Imran Perretta. 

She has exhibited and had performances staged at Bold Tendencies, Peckham (2020); Photoworks, London (2019) and 4:3 Boiler Room (2019); Somerset House, London, Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Chisenhale Studios, London,  Turner Contemporary, Margate (2018) and The Photographer’s Gallery, London (2017).​ International exhibitions and residencies include Cairotronica (Cairo Electronic and New Media Arts Festival), Cairo Palace of Arts (2018); Cyan Gallery, Oslo (2018);  Node Forum for the Digital Arts and the Goethe-Institut, at Naxoshalle, Frankfurt (2017) and TADAEX (Tehran Annual Digital Art Festival), Mohsen Gallery, Tehran (2016). Lilian studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths and The Ruskin at Oxford University, where she received a full Oxford PGT Graduate Studentship, and Yoga and Meditation Studies at SOAS.  She is currently a member of EAST (Eating At the Same Table Collective), WANAWAL (The West African and North African Women’s Art Library) and Collective Ending.

This residency is sponsored by Minerva, a leadership advisory and executive search firm with a strong focus on diversity and inclusion and a commitment to sectors which have social impact.

“A partnership with the Van Gogh House builds on our long-standing commitment to support the sectors that we serve and develops our commitment to supporting Artists. We are excited by the bold approach of these two Residents and are delighted to provide them with this opportunity”.

Ben Tucker and Kerry Shepherd, Minerva