James Moss & Xhi Ndubisi: Artworks & Projects
12 Last Songs, 2024-2025
Xhi Ndubisi: Project Animateur.
Part live exhibition, part performance, 12 Last Songs is about work and how we spend our time. Making a living. Finding your passion. Watching the clock. Over 12 hours from midday to midnight, all sorts of people from Perth turn up to perform a shift, talking about what they do and how they see the world. A decorator might paper a wall, a nail technician apply a fresh set, a barista serve up a coffee.
“A reminder that all lives are extraordinary in their ordinariness.” The Stage
Making Believe, 2024-2025
Test pieces for immersive AV installation incorporating cut up, manipulated and reassembled spoken word readings of books by Clara Barton, Virginia Woolf, Sigmund Freud and Henrietta Marshall plus texts from Xhi Ndubisi and Jo Manby's Passing Cloud series. Collaged and edited archive film exploring authorship, obsolescence and illusion in the information age.
Art House Middleton, 2024-2025
A free community art space in Middleton, Greater Manchester. Public creative workshops and activities for residents of all ages programmed by Xhi Ndubisi.
The Wild Open Archive, 2024
Modular collages on recycled perspex forming a series of theatrical stage flats that visitors can move through and re-assemble. Adaptable to incorporate participants’ own compositions and local archive materials.
The Portico Library, 2015-2023
Contemporary art exhibitions, performances and programmes interpreting and contextualising the library’s 200-year-old book collection with Manchester’s communities. Intergenerational audience and organisation development work culminating in NLHF support to finance a £7 million capital project to reconnect all areas of the original Georgian-era building for the city’s arts and heritage ecologies. Curated by James Moss.
Fun & Games, 2020-2021
Exhibition, events, and online interactive activities asking what makes a game a game? After a year in which many have experienced the challenging effects of lockdowns and social isolation, the Portico Library invited the public to a programme celebrating games and recreation through the ages. Does it always include an element of fun, play, skill or luck? From Jane Austen’s depictions of the card-playing Georgian middle classes to Dickens’ festivals and dances, 19th-century literature describes the roles that pastimes play in our cultural lives, and the social, moral and intellectual aspects of game-playing. Curated by James Moss with Rowland Hill.
The World Reimagined, 2022-2023
James Moss, Learning Consultant
Coordinating displays of sculptural artworks by young people and community groups in 70 venues across seven UK cities; creating and delivering learning resources on the history of the Transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans for 150 schools around England and Wales. Lead artist Yinka Shonibare.
The Pear Project, 2022
Xhi Ndubisi
A day of performance art, spoken word and happenings focusing on stories of human migration within the context of the environment and sustainability, with artists taking you through feudal China, the ancient gardens of Afghanistan, over French Orchards, into the British Landscape and Lancashire.
Second Nature, 2019
James Moss and Navid Asghari
Studies have shown that not only do nature sounds (birdsong, trickling water) induce positive brain activity and reduce stress, but artificial, simulated nature sounds also have beneficial effects. For Second Nature: What is “nature” anyway?, we built a grotto of synthetic plants where speakers played real-life and synthesized nature sounds created by composer Navid Asghari. Re-introducing sounds previously absent from the city-centre venue, this installation invited visitors to consider authenticity and artificiality and what we mean by “natural/unnatural”. The real-life audio included recordings from Rae Story’s Breathing Spaces project with TLC Saint Luke’s, which maps Manchester’s tranquil spaces for people experiencing mental health problems and emotional distress.
That Sinking Feeling, 2018
With ARM. Installation, film, sound and sculpture.
‘Oumuamua, the first known interstellar object to pass through our solar system, moves past the earth, cold to the existential crisis facing the planet’s inhabitants. The scout from afar is strange, as are we. In fact, as we race to understand more, we become even stranger, and so do the objects and phenomena we encounter. The search for understanding and technological advancement has led to what many consider to be a new epoch in the history of the Earth—the Anthropocene. That Sinking Feeling seeks to reflect our current predicament, the artefacts we create in our pursuit of progress, imagined futures (that may or may not contain us) and the complex emotional states we find ourselves in. ARM is a UK-based, cross-disciplinary arts practice comprising Navid Asghari, David Rogerson and James Moss.
Botanical Magic, 2019
James Moss, Deiniol Williams and Lindsey Loughtman
Grid of backlit antique glass magic lantern slides from Manchester Museum, revealing the colonial and extractive histories embedded in its botanical collections. The images show seeds, cells, zoophytes, landscapes, diatoms, cotton production, teaching models, and real and artificial plants including cocoa beans, breadfruit, water lilies, palms and ferns.
Feint, 2015
James Moss and Chan-yang Kim, book
“Feint draws from a wide array of conceptual influences, from the tempting immersions of Roger Hiorns to Ernesto Neto’s attempts to connect the interior and exterior, and Tacita Dean’s projections and landscapes – the works position painting within a cinematic context, oversized and animated. As with Cindy Sherman’s desire to “make something out of the culture”, Moss’s work examines itself – the viewing is disrupted by the constantly changing light, the artifice slips.” – Fuse Art Space
“This is one of the greatest joys of Moss’s paintings, they require of us (and reward!) the study of every corner of change and movement across the surface… each intersection of colour; each gradation of form.” – Susanna Caudwell
The 72-page book documenting James Moss's project at Fuse Art Space, Feint, features 100 photos of work from the exhibition by Chan-yang Kim, plus an essay on the work by Rowland Hill and an introduction by Sarah Faraday.
Untied States, text, 2020
50 entries from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, software-translated five times to create space for rethinking the vocabulary around psychology, mental health and emotional distress. A new version of Untied States formed the basis of a group project with 50 contemporary artists, each paired with one entry, in The Portico Library’s 2020 exhibition, Talking Sense: The changing vocabulary of mind and brain.
The British Psychological Society said of the DSM: “the general public are negatively affected by the continued and continuous medicalisation of their natural and normal responses to their experiences; responses which undoubtedly have distressing consequences… but which do not reflect illnesses so much as normal individual variation”.
Nil (detail)
625 8cm x 8cm digital paintings, 2004. Before social media, Wikipedia, or AI image generation, digital painting already allowed us to explore the parameters of our aesthetic impulses, and art’s relationships with time and productivity. In 2001, as our world of visual and information overload was emerging, I began work on this series of small digital paintings. Creating a few of these images each week for the following three years served to test my own ideas about taste, beauty, outmodedness, and obsolescence in art.
Bios
Artist-Curators
Venues and broadcasts including ARTE, TF1, BBC, Cité de la Mode et du Design, Perth Festival, Manchester Art Gallery, Fuse Art Space, St John on Bethnal Green, Bluedot, Festival Number 6, Bristol Folk House and Greenroom. 2004–present
Passing Cloud, Xhi Ndubisi & Jo Manby for The Fourdrinier, 2023–2025
The Lowry, James Moss, Curator, Contemporary Art (Nikta Mohammadi, Jo Lathwood, Hew Locke) 2023–2024
Dining In at The Portico Library, Xhi Ndubisi, 2023
With Darryl Gadzekpo, Ella Phillips, Peggy Brunache, Renny O'Shea, Zuleika Lebow, Uli Westfal, Quarantine, Sheila Gheleni and Sue Palmer, Stephanie Black-Daniels, Ecaterina Stefanescu, Horace Lindezey, Terry Williams
Refloresta!
Maria Nepomuceno at The Portico Library, James Moss, 2021
Fun & Games: Playtime, past & present at The Portico Library, James Moss 2021
With Birungi Kawooya, Apapat Jai-in Glynn, Bob Bicknell-Knight, Le Ha Thu, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Gray Wielebinski, Hope Strickland, Polly Tayarachakul
Lancaster Arts
Xhi Ndubisi, Associate Creative Producer, 2019-2023
Fancy Pants, 2019
Leonce Raphael Agbodjelou, Ruby Kirby, Lindsey Mendick, Camille Smithwick, House of Ghetto.
Second Nature: What is ‘nature’ anyway? 2019
James Moss with Navid Asghari, Jackie Chettur, Oliver East, Jessica El Mal, Louise Hewitt, Ruth Murray, Joanna Whittle, Amy Lawrence, Journeys Festival International, Venture Arts and Let’s Keep Growing,
Samarbeta, Ex-Easter Island Head / Crime Scene, Islington Mill / Supersonic, 2017
Mother, Bluedot, 2016
Feint, Fuse Art Space, 2015
Video Jam, Manchester Art Gallery, 2014
Mind the Gap: Less is More Projects, Cite de la Mode et du Design, 2010
Going to the Match on Tour
Touring LS Lowry’s 1953 masterpiece to five under-served North West towns and running associated free creative activities for children and community groups, 2024
What it is to be here: Colonisation & resistance, 2020
Helen Idle, Rene Kulitja, Steve Dixon, the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, Lowitja Institute and Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Women's Council
Talking Sense: The changing vocabulary of mind and brain 2020. Fifty artists. Fifty minds. Fifty artworks in paint, film, drawing, sculpture and print
BiblioTech: from bookshelf to big data, 2018
Dan Hays, Jane Lawson, Claire Tindale.
In So Many Words: Roget’s Thesaurus & the power of language, 2018
Jez Dolan, Sarah Rowland Hill, Jonathan Hitchen.
The Things That Look Back, 2018. Nicola Dale,
Bittersweet: Legacies of Slavery & Abolition in Manchester, 2017
Lubaina Himid, Keith Piper, Mary Evans plus items from Manchester Art Gallery & Quarry Bank Mill, co-curated with Dr Natalie Zacek.
Recollection: Memory & time, 2017. Saima Rasheed, Alnoor Mitha, Maggie Hargreaves, Leo Robinson, Stacey Coughlin.
Cut Cloth: Contemporary Textiles & Feminism, 2017
Sarah-Joy Ford and artists Tilleke Schwartz, Wendy Huhn, Orly Cogan… + items from People’s History Museum & The Pankhurst Centre.
Made In Translation, 2017
Alice Kettle: Stephen Dixon, Louise Adkins... with Manchester Metropolitan University School of Arts & Humanities.
Be Strong, Live Happy & Love: 350 Years of Paradise Lost, 2017
Chloë Manasseh, Ilona Kiss, Kate Shaw, Helen Mather + items from Chethams Library.
Many Splendoured Thing, 2016
Raphael Fonseca and Gê Orthof. Manchester School of Art, HOME and Prêmio Marcantonio Vilaça/Plano Cultural.
Non-Places of Intelligence, 2016
Shreepad Joglekar.
The Four Guardians of the Sky, 2016. Ousama Lazkani,
James Moss publications, talks, awards, commissions
Old Tools > New Masters ≠ New Futures, panel discussion with Contact Young Company and Young Identity, Manchester Art Gallery, 2019
Bankley Open, selection panel judging prizewinner and runners up, 2018
The Sea is History & Lettres du Voyant artist Q&A, HOME, 2018
Cut Cloth: Contemporary Textiles & Feminism, PO Publishing, 2017
Made In Translation published by MMU/The Portico Library, 2017
Future Legacies symposium, University of Leeds, 2017
Many-Splendoured Thing, Raphael Fonseca/Manchester Met, 2016
Process artist/curator talk, Bankley Studios & Gallery, 2016
Feint monograph, pub. Fuse, 2015
ArtWork Atelier project space, residency, 2013
Press & media
Refloresta!, Embroidery magazine, 2021
Fun & Games, Mancunian Matters, 2021
Colonisation and Resistance, Journal of Museum Ethnography, 2020
Bittersweet, Northern Soul, 2017
Coming In From The Cold, Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Education Trust, 2017
Be Strong, Live Happy & Love, Northern Soul, 2017
Most promising act, Sounds from the Other City, The Independent, 2016
Mother, TF1, 2016
Best of 2015, BBC 6 Music, 2015
Métropolis artist spotlight, ARTE, 2015
Cue: Art in Manchester, Corridor8, 2013
James Moss at Brahm Gallery, The Independent, 2011
Events, producer/programmer
ማን እያወራ እንዳለ ይመልከቱ - Look who’s Talking, interpretive performance by Binyam Zenebe Andargie, Tsige Haile and Masresha Getahun-Wondmu, co-produced with Nuria Lopez de la Oliva Mena, 2019
Fancy Pants Fancy Party, performance by House of Ghetto, choreography by Darren Pritchard, wearable artworks by Ruby Kirby, 2019
Gut Healing, interactive performance composed and directed by Amy Lawrence, with Henrietta Phoebe Dunn, Selena Laverne Daye, Alison Erika Forde, Diana Tap, Harold Offeh, Elmi Ali, 2017
Education & training
ArtUK & Manchester Art Gallery: Caring for Your Sculpture Collection, 2020
British Museum: Resilient Heritage mentorship, 2019
Common Cause Foundation & Manchester Museum: Embedding Shared Values, 2019-2020
Touring Exhibitions Group & Wellcome Collection: Preparing to Borrow, 2018
