Announcing the artists for Syllabus IX

The Syllabus partners are delighted to welcome artists Jessica Ashman, Alex Billingham, Romane Courdacher, George Gibson, Umama Hamido, Natalie Mitchell, Betty/Chaoying Rao 饶超颖 / Femme Castratrice, Korallia Stergides, Symoné and Jonny Walker to Syllabus IX!  

Now in its ninth year, Syllabus is a co-designed, alternative learning programme that creates an environment of mutual exchange between the artists that is responsive to each cohort.  

Beginning in September 2026, Syllabus IX will be built around a series of intensive in-person weekend gatherings. The ten selected artists will collaboratively develop the curriculum with curators and artists from partner organisations, Syllabus Coordinator Freya Yeates and Syllabus IX Artist Lead, Harun Morrison. 

Syllabus IX is delivered in partnership with Wysing Arts Centre, Eastside Projects, Live Art Development Agency (LADA), PS², Site Gallery, and Studio Voltaire (Associate Partner/Alumni Gathering Host) and funded by Freelands Foundation and Arts Council England. 

About the artists

Korallia Stergides (she/her) practice centres the embodiment of care between human and non-human, through abstracted notions of touch and shared vulnerabilities. She uses performance, film, installation, writing, sound, drawing, photography and printmaking, to construct autofictions grounded in ecofeminism and eco-crip theory. Stergides also performs improvised, theatrical personifications designed and directed in the form of Tours, Sales and Amusements to heighten awareness of localised political, ecological and mental health research. Recent projects include A Tragical Romance, Wonnerth Dejaco (2024) and New Contemporaries, Camden Arts Centre (2023).  

Jessica Ashman (she/her) is a Jamaican black British interdisciplinary artist, working across painting, natural dye, animation, textiles, music and performance, which culminate in immersive installations. Ashman’s practice is rooted in the black Caribbean and working-class diaspora archive –both personal and institutional –aiming to dismantle the archive as a gatekeeper of knowledge. Ashman is particularly interested in the blurred space between fact and folklore, archival absence and cultural inheritance.  Recent projects include Chimera Island at Modern Painters, New Decorators (2025) and Those that do not smile will kill me: Decolonising Jamaican Flora, Bristol Museum & Art Gallery (2025). 

Betty/Chaoying Rao 饶超颖 / Femme Castratrice (she/her/any) is a Glasgow-based visual artist. Her creative practice investigates the weaponisation of desire under patriarchy and western myth-making structures about the orient. Rao’s research materialises in photography, live art, moving image, sculpture, and installation. Recent projects include House of Tolerance at the Bundeskunsthalle (2026), ReQOL-10 performed at Glasgow Women's Library (2025) and Narratives and Counternarratives screened at Queer East (2025). 

Symoné (she/her) is a Guinness World Record-holding queer interdisciplinary performer, director, and alternative game designer. She works across circus, cabaret, performance art, and game technologies. Blending pole dance, roller-skating, hula hoop and immersive design, her work thematically considers power, spectatorship, and the unconscious through form-driven performance.  Recent projects include founding the Live Art and Gaming Network during residency at Live Art Development Agency (2025). She is a current recipient of BAFTA's Prince William Award and a trustee with The Posh Club by Duckie.  

Alex Billingham (she/her) is an artist working across live art, film, and other visual art and media. She is currently developing WAYFINDER, a five-year research project investigating memory loss and our connection to time through intergalactic ley lines. Blending bubble-gum aesthetics with ethereal post-human landscapes, she imagines better ways for us all to survive. Recent projects include Neon Caverns, a solo show commissioned and exhibited by Level Centre. Her work has been acquired by The New Art Gallery Walsall, and she has performed at Tate St Ives. She has also undertaken residencies with Ugly Duck, Hospitalfield, The Herbert, Live Art Ireland and others.   

Umama Hamido (she/her) is a Lebanese artist and filmmaker based in London. Working across moving image, installation, and performance, her practice examines sites of exile, borders, migration, and the realities of displacement.  Recent projects include THE SPIDER IS THE CLOCK with Stephen Lawrence Gallery (2022), and Artsadmin and Shubbak Festival (2021). Hamido is currently developing her first feature documentary, Stratford King (working title). 

 
George Gibson (they/them) is an artist operating between research and craft, utilising zine making, lo-fi print processes, and book arts to document personal fixations and the communities that are created as a result. Through regularly run public workshops, they delve into themes of cultural memory, fandom, and unofficial histories: from contemporary bird divination and queer retellings of Godzilla to the psychological impact of early 2000s TV phenomena LOST.  Recent projects include Fake Fans commissioned by Site Gallery, Sheffield (2025), and The Forth Wall exhibited at HOME, Manchester (2024). Gibson is a member of ABC (Artists’ Books Cooperative). 

Jonny Walker (he/him) is an artist from Glasgow working in sculpture, installation and text. His work is led by an interest in sites of friction between objects, systems, language and the body: points of collision and permeability, and the ways in which systems function, hold together and fail to contain. Recent projects include Will we ever get a good night sleep again?, 16 Collective, Glasgow (2025); A shard in my eye, Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, Edinburgh (2024) and Where a Castle Meets the Sky, Glasgow International, Glasgow (2024). 

Natalie Mitchell (they/them) is an artist and curator based in London. Working across moving image, photography, oral history, archives and sound, they draw on collaborative and research-led processes to consider questions of visibility, place and collective experience, with a particular interest in Black diasporic histories. They use documentary, poetic and speculative approaches. Recent film projects include Matta Fancanta, Come Guard Yourself Against Self-Destruction (2026), this one goes out to The Dance (2024), and She climbed the Heath (2023). 

romane courdacher (they/them/she/her) is a French multidisciplinary artist based in London, working across sculpture, installation, performance, image-making and writing. Their practice emerges from a fascination with the uncanny and the spectral, focusing on ruins, abandoned artefacts and discarded belongings. Through immersive, multi-sensory environments, their work looks at hauntology, liminality, world-building and theatricality in relation to memory, traumas, and affects. Collaborations with curators, sound designers, artists and writers play an essential role in shaping how their work comes to life. Recent projects include: Zerri3a, a collective of artists, ecologists, academics and students working together with local villagers and labourers to regenerate 1.7 hectares of dry land near the Al-Wahda dam in Northern Morocco. They also co-curate Unit 2 Project Space, an artist-run space in North London supporting queer practices through exhibitions and workshops. 

PS² is supported by The National Lottery through Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Belfast City Council's Artists' Studio and Makerspace Organisational Grant, Arts & Business NI's Blueprint Investment Grant, and Dormant Assets NI through The National Lottery Community Fund.