Dr George Clark

George Clark is an artist, writer and curator. His work explores the history of images and how they are governed by culture and technology as well as social and political conditions.

George studied Fine Art (BA Hons) at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts, London (2000–2003) and his PhD at University of Westminster (2016-2020). His work and research have focused on moving image in the expanded field working across film, installation and performance with a focus on collaborative practice in global context. His projects explore non-aligned histories and geographies, looking to question how histories are constructed and developing methods of exchange and collaboration globally. In recent years he has worked to build new models of cultural production through expanded transnational collaboration.

At Westminster he leads the MA in Global Contemporary Art and contributes to the MA Film, TV and Moving Image leading the Curation Pathway and lecturing on wide range of moving image culture. He is PhD supervisor and active as researcher with CREAM (Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media).

George Clark’s research focuses on moving images in the expanded field working across film, installation and performance with an interest in inter-local collaborative practice. His projects explore non-aligned histories and geographies seeking to build new models of assembly, exhibition and moving image production. He has an established international research profile in fields of contemporary art, curatorial practice and artist moving image work and a track record of producing research outputs at high standards across these fields.

Recent projects include:

Sunless Haven (2024) is situated in moving image practices reconsidering models of creative nonfiction filmmaking in post-colonial context. The film was commissioned as part research project Within Worlds, supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AH/W000059/1) led by Dr. Simeon Koole, University of Bristol.

With the project he explored how film can be a tool to imagine the experiences in, around and through the London Docklands at the turn of the 20th century. Enveloping various overlapping stories, the project involved working in collaboration with the sound artist Jol Thoms (https://radioamnion.net/) and performance artist Yarli Allison (https://yarliallison.com/). The film attempts to understand the docklands as a meeting place between different ecologies, enclosures and epochs, as a point of entanglement of the city and world. The 32 minutes 16mm film ‘Sunless Haven’ was the opening night film of the 2023 Open City Documentary Film Festival at the ICA and has been shown internationally at Bangkok Experimental Film Festival, DocLisboa and European Media Arts Festival where it received the 2024 EMAF Award and 2025 Biennale Jatim.

The Scattered Body or A World Unclouded by Dust (2024) explores fragmented histories and the invisible work to care for archival objects from a Vietnamese community archive in Hackney to a state film archive in Hanoi. Moving through the archives and their systems of care, the body is both a material and medium to explore the multiple lives of archival objects, the spaces that contain them and the ecstatic labour that sustains them. 

The film was developed through long term collaborative project called Speaking Nearby (2020-23) that included archival and curatorial training programmes and workshops. The project also involved a series of new art commissions by UK and Vietnamese artists. The Scattered Body or A World Unclouded by Dust has been shown in the following exhibitions: Well-Settled at LUX (London, Nov-Dec 2023), ‘Alternating Waves: Imaging the Archive’ at The Outpost (Nov – Dec 2023), Taiwan International Video Art Exhibition at Hang-Gah Museum (Taipei, Nov 2023 - Jan 2024), Slow Forward at Indeks (Bandung, Indonesia, Jan 2024) and ‘Painting with Light’ at National Gallery of Singapore (Sept 2025).

His work with the Indonesia artworks collective Jatiwangi art Factory began in 2017 and developed through various projects since then with foundation of the West Java West Yorkshire Cooperative Movement (2018-ongoing). Key recent projects include: Mother Bank (est. 2020-ongoing) and Karmapala (2023-2024). They have exhibited work together recently at ESEA Contemporary,  Manchester, August 2024 and he participated as artistic respondents to the New Rural Agenda transnational summit at Documenta, Kassel, Germany, 2022. The Mother Bank project has been presented at Biennale Jogja XVI Equator #6, at National Museum of Jogja, (Oct – Nov 2021) and Kochi-Muziris Biennale (February 2023). 

Karmapala Through the Forbidden Scenes is a speculative investigation of an unmade film by Indonesian director Bachtiar Siagian, imagined in dialogue with archival fragments from other lost films and the non-aligned movement. The project is a collaboration between George Clark and Bunga Siagian. The outputs for this include presentations and performance lectures presented at Film Undone: Elements of a Latent Cinema, Arsenale, Berlin (2023), Birkbeck Institute of Moving Image, London (2024), Bangkok Experimental Film Festival (2025), ‘Tidal Rifts: Art, Cinema and Solidarity in East and Southeast Asia,’ Goethe Institute, Manila (2025) as well contributing chapter to the publication ‘Film Undone: Elements of a Latent Cinema’, Ed. Philip Widmann, Archive Books, 2024. The Karmapala project was recently written about in a feature article by Max Crosbie-Jones called ‘The Restorers Art’ in Art Review Summer 2025.

Double Ghosts (2017-2020), an evolving multi-part project included a series of film installations and performances culminating in exhibition at the Taiwan Biennale (2018) and Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival (2019), an expansive and experimental written text and series of curatorial interventions in Chile, UK and Taiwan. Encompassing filmmaking, installations, performances, writing and trans-local collaborations, the project sought to critically question prevailing notions of what constitutes an artwork exploring how artists work with images, fragments and traces in connection with complex histories and post-colonial geographies. 

For details of all my research outputs, visit my WestminsterResearch profile.