Proposals, Prompts and Speculations Symposium, June 2025

FRI 13 JUNE, Green Room, Chelsea College of Arts

We invite artists and writers to present their work as it could relate to ‘the proposal’. This can be interpreted broadly to include, for example: outlandish or banal propositions; scripts; scores, unrealised and realised plans; concrete professional proposals; prompts to others or AI; future probes; manifestoes; diagrams; living otherwise; uneducated guesswork; marriage offers or anything else you consider relevant.  

The event forms part of ‘Proposals for Re-imagining Practice’.

10.45 - Welcome  

Andy Weir 

11.00 - 12.30 - Proposals for Publics  

Chair – Taey Iohe 

(20 min presentations + 30 min discussion at end)  

Abbas Zahedi 

In this presentation, I’ll speak to the ways my practice has evolved as a means of attending to grief, rupture, and collective listening—shifting the question of public art from audience to witness. Using recent projects such as Begin Again at Tate Modern, I’ll explore how art might operate as infrastructure for care, especially in spaces where official narratives have failed or been withheld. 

Abbas Zahedi is a London-based artist working across sound, sculpture, performance, and social practice. With a background in medicine and contemporary philosophy, Zahedi’s work addresses systems of care, collective grief, and the politics of visibility. Recent presentations include Tate Modern, CAPC Bordeaux, and Art Basel. He is the recipient of the Frieze Artist Award (2022) and Stanley Picker Fellowship (2024). 

Rebecca Lennon 

Polyphonic Anarchitectures  

When voice is shared, it transgresses boundaries between bodies and places. It moves through walls, and cannot be contained, evading privacy and the individual. Voice is anarchic, and collective. Moving beyond the body, it is both dispossessed and possessed, haunted. 

This presentation will bring together two ideas: speculative vocal architecture in the work of medieval composer Hildegard Von Bingen and anarchitecture in the work of Gordon Matta Clark, sharing my own sonic artworks to propose collective voice/s, no matter how dissonant or harmonious, as a force for resistance that reimagines new worlds and futures. 

Rebecca Lennon is an artist working across media to produce multi-channel, spatial sound and video installations, musical releases, performances, texts, drawings and textiles. She is also a Chase PhD researcher at Goldsmiths working between the art and music departments. She has had solo shows at Southwark Park Galleries, 2021, Primary, Nottingham, 2020,  Almanac, Turin, Italy, 2019 and Matts Gallery, London, 2018. She is currently working on a collaboration with the Hildegard Von Bingen society for Gardening Companions 2025. 

Rebecca Moss  

I will discuss two projects that both especially connect to the idea of proposals and publics: a performance lecture I did which took place on ten swan pedalos in Stratford in 2024, and my ghost train project in Basel, describing my process of assembling a proposal for them and the different stages of developing the projects. I will discuss how I came to be invited to work on these projects and how I developed my ideas during the proposal stages, including generating strong imagery to convey ideas, the publics and participants involved, and considering the agendas of different groups.  

Rebecca Moss is an artist based in Essex and East London. Her work humorously explores notions of absurdity and precarity, and takes a variety of forms across sculpture, video, performance, installation, and participatory practice. Moss recently completed a project with Museum Tinguely in Basel, involving an 'art ghost train' where she was invited to propose a series of scary moments to occur along the track of a ghost train ride, to celebrate the 100th birthday of Jean Tinguely. She is also an associate lecturer on the BA and MA Sculpture courses at Camberwell. 

LUNCH 12.30 - 1.30   

1.30 - 3.00 - Scripts, Prompts and Prototypes 

Chair – Echo Xie 

(20 min presentations + 30 min discussion at end)  

David Musgrave  

Prompts are the backbone of the current wave of Generative AI. They create the impression that a human user is fundamentally in control of the output, be it an essay, a moving image clip or a business plan. A ‘prompt’ is not a set of detailed instructions, but a textual way to cajole a system into action... What does it mean that the prompt is so central to the use of AI, and has given rise to the sub-industry of ‘prompt engineering’, or optimising textual nudges to create an optimal response? What are the implications for artistic — and human — agency? 

David Musgrave is an artist, novelist and lecturer based in London. He has exhibited extensively in the UK and globally, including solo shows at Tate Britain; greengrassi, London; Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis; Luhring Augustine, New York; and Marc Foxx, Los Angeles. His speculative fiction novel Lambda is published by Europa Editions in the UK and US, and in Italy by Edizione E/O. 

Aziza Kadyri  

In this presentation, Aziza Kadyri will share her ongoing research and artistic practice, which harnesses AI and extended reality not as tools of replication but as collaborators in reimagining cultural memory. ..Drawing from her recent projects (Don’t Miss the Cue, 2024; Soft Data, 2024; Lighter Than The Words We Share, 2025), Kadyri will critically examine how algorithmic systems participate in both the remembering and erasure of cultural narratives, replicating bias, aestheticising misinformation, and reshaping our sense of origin. 

Aziza Kadyri is a London-based interdisciplinary artist working across textiles, installation, performance, and creative technology. She is the co-founder of Qizlar, a collective of artists and activists from Uzbekistan and its diaspora. She represented Uzbekistan at the 60th Venice Biennale of Art and has exhibited internationally. She is currently a Creative Technologies Fellow at Somerset House Studios in partnership with UAL: CCI. 

Keira Greene 

Keira will present her 2024 moving image work Máthair, with a particular focus on the development of the performance score; a performance with four dance artists that is woven throughout the work. 

Keira is an artist working across film, photography, performance and text. Her work is preoccupied with the social and organic life and landscape of specific environments. Her work is produced through a collaborative and conversational practice of looking, writing and forming enduring relationships. Recent works are concerned with ideas of the body and the experience of emotion, in dialogue with an embodied filmmaking practice. Film works by Greene are distributed by LUX. 

3pm – Closing Comments  

Andy Weir, Taey Iohe, Echo Xie 

images - Hennessey Youngman, from Art Thoughtz, 2011

Rebecca Moss, 2025