PULSE: School of The Damned

For the next iteration of PULSE, School of the Damned presents work across moving image, performance and sound, exploring the concept of 'conjuncture': moments when social, political and material contradictions intensify and overlap. Over two days, these ideas will unfold in the Upper Gallery.

Taking Stuart Hall’s concept of the conjuncture as a starting point, the installation considers a present shaped by overlapping crises, shifting social geographies and unstable relationships between individuals and systems. The presentation opens with performances on Friday evening and runs through to Sunday.

Featuring work by Carolin Meyer, Daisy C, George Valentine, Ollie Godwin, Titus Barker and collaborators.

PULSE is our platform for emerging interdisciplinary and collaborative practices, supporting artists to experiment with new ideas and forms.

Still from the video work CRUSH by Carolin Meyer.

Bios School of the Damned is an alternative arts and education platform based across the UK. It was founded in 2014 as a direct reaction to the increasing financialisation of Higher Education and operates without tuition fees. The course is entirely peer led and self-directed with each year designing its own curriculum. Its structure is decentralised with a continual aim to dissolve hierarchies through rigorous self-critique. After two years, the cohort finishes by choosing its successors with no one carrying over. Carolin Meyer is a conceptual artist & DJ based in London, who mainly dabbles in found objects & sounds, sculptural still lifes, and the abject. Shaped by her experience of transracial adoption at birth (Kurdish-German), her interdisciplinary practice, spanning moving image, sculpture, sound, painting/digital images, collage, text, installation, and live art, employs the psychoanalytic method of 'archeological excavation' to dig up her and other complex buried pasts and "scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil" (Walter Benjamin, ca. 1932). Her mixed media works using found objects and waste materials such as hair often play with the line between infrastructure and sculpture, and she approaches sound in the way of extending the field that affects an audience. Areas of interest widely include identity and belonging, techno-social transformations, neoliberalism, bio politics and, de-anthropocentrism. Daisy C's work uses the process of image making, tracing and deconstructing, referencing in the process. She has created work that has previously become moving image, sculpture, animation and drawings. George Valentine Avill’s practice centres the archiving and personal excavation of the trans identity. His written work explores the identification and mediation of self through visual objects. George's often auto-ethnographic approach attempts to flesh out an understanding of transness with veeringly uncomfortable candour. Katherine Brown is an artist and writer based in East Kent. Her work concerns how our fleshy bodies navigate the physical, political and digital. She works across drawing, sculpture and installation and is the co-founder of The Body Room, a participatory and immersive experience, established in 2019. She has presented work during Folkestone Fringe (2025), received a research grant from Goldsmiths’ Social, Therapeutic and Community Studies department (2024), with findings published by Routledge (2025) in ‘Practice Research through Creative Bodies: perspectives on embodied enquiry’, edited by Caroline Frizel and Marina Rova. Ollie Godwin is an artist living and working in London. His work explores archival and collaborative practices, rituals, collecting, prophecy, repetition, improvisation, diary making, isolation, belief, systems of control. He is a founding member of Needless Alley Performance Collective, current guitarist and singer for SHIFTS and BIMP, and co-founder of Sunday Sound Church. Titus Barker is an artist from London. Their artwork engages in sonic, moving image and pedagogical practices. For PULSE, Titus focuses on societal results from the near past. They use performance, video and sound to explore the antiquated by resurrecting and ritualistically sacrificing. A continual readjustment and assessment of our relationship with self-machinery.