Artist Studios
We offer free studios to make being an artist possible for the community we support.
Studio Residents at Metroland
At the heart of Metroland Cultures is the studio building and how we can build and prioritise an artistic community through and around the building that we maintain.
At a time when spaces for artists and communities to gather and create is increasingly under threat, Metroland Cultures is committed to maintaining a studio resource that prioritises collectivity over profit.
Through our free studio programme, we prioritise those who are nurturing cultural and community infrastructure, creating resources for others, and ensuring that cultural production remains embedded in and accountable to the communities it comes from.
Metroland Studios is host to a community of artists and cultural practitioners living in, or connected to, our neighbourhood, this includes:
1. Long-term residents who are doing collaborative work in the community alongside us.
2. Building users who activate and use our social space for their collective and community organising work and public workshops and events.
3. Peer-to-Peer residency programmes, which supports artists to develop their practice with the support of free studio space and programme of workshops.
Everyone who takes up residency at Metroland Studios becomes an active member in our community. Residencies rotate but when we invite new artists to take up residency in our studios all previous residents are invited to join us for monthly lunches, exhibitions and events.
Currently at home in Metroland Studios are:
Adam Farah-Saad
Adam Farah-Saad lives and works in London. He uses a range of media and cultural references to evoke coming-of-age memories tied to a sense of place and time, to relationships, love and loss. Adam was a commissioned artist for the 2020 Biennial ‘On the Side of the Future’, and was part of the Curatorial Committee for the 2022 Brent Biennial ‘In the House of My Love’, alongside Jamilla Prowse and Abbas Zahedi. Since 2021, he has been a resident in Metroland Studios in Kilburn. Recent solo exhibitions include Public Gallery, London, UK (2023); Camden Arts Centre, London, UK (2021); and South London Gallery, London, UK (2018). His work is part of the permanent collections of Tate, UK and the Arts Council, UK. Adam Farah Saad and Elvis Universe’s exhibition the face of you, my substitute for love was shown at Metroland Studios in 2024.
BETA SOUND
BETA SOUND is an audio studio that encourages improvisation and experimentation with sound, with an emphasis on collaboration and exploring new methodologies of creating. BETA SOUND is founded, run and facilitated by Bill Daggs and Elian Gray.
Elvis Universe
Elvis Universe is an artist, poet, activist, mental health advocate, amateur philosopher and self-proclaimed gangster of love. He contributed work to Arcadia Missa’s HOW TO SLEEP FASTER ISSUE 14: Mental Health And Art in Crisis (2024). Elvis Universe and Adam Farah Saad’s exhibition the face of you, my substitute for love, was shown at Metroland Studios in 2024.
Francesca Telling (she/her)
Francesca Telling is an artist, facilitator and learning practitioner. Francesca’s practice investigates how the social histories of displaced communities are seen in objects and images. She uses sculpture, photography, writing and time-based media to explore the grief embedded in migration narratives – asking what it means to collect things in the context of survival and assimilation, and how this is recorded.
As a facilitator Francesca explores structural inequalities in education, collaborating with children and young people to reimagine learning environments and their authority. Her work is informed by anti-racist approaches and activated by locality, usually emerging through combining dialogue with participatory documentation. Francesca is currently supported by Grand Plan Fund to develop research into oral history and diasporic labour across London’s archive sector.
Francesca was part of Metroland Culture’s 2024/25 Peer-to-Peer cohort.
http://francescatelling.com/
K2K Radio
K2K provides a platform for anyone to share their voices and passions with the world with opportunities to also meet and connect locally at events and gatherings. Since 2012, the tribe has blossomed and now has a dedicated station manager, a super studio tech team, media consultants and a multitude of regular, besides new, DJs presenting a mix of great tunes, random endeavours, local and global focus plus wonderful conversation with a heart sprinkle of banter. They offer free radio production workshops, train budding studio managers and aspiring presenters to allow them to experiment and flourish to industry standards.
Linett Kamala
Linett Kamala is a DJ, Artist, Academic, Creative Producer & Founding Director of Lin Kam Art. She works across various disciplines including installation, paintings, public art, DJ soundscapes and performance.
Linett is known as the Notting Hill Carnival ‘Sound System Queen’, being credited as one of the first female DJs to perform on a sound system in the mid 1980s at the event and now serves as its Board Director. Today she continues to champion inclusion within sound system culture, advocating for underrepresented groups, including her two initiatives; Lin Kam Art Sound System Futures Programme developing the next generation and Original Sounds Collective; amplifying the presence of women in sound system and moving the culture forward.
Lin Kam Art enriches all lives through festival and sound system culture via public art, takeovers, events, workshops, residencies and programmes. Deeply rooted in community empowerment the socially focused company engages with thousands of people across all ages each year through a range of interventions.
She is also President of the University of the Arts London Alumni of Colour Association, Associate Lecturer in Performance: Design and Practice at the University of the Arts London and in BA (Hons) Live Event Management at the Institute of Contemporary Music Performance.
You can keep up to date with Linett on her website and Linktree.
Nathaniel Télémaque
Nathaniel Télémaque is a North West London born and raised visual artist, writer and researcher who photographs, films and writes about ‘everyday things’ in various local and global urban settings. Bearing witness to mad cities and maverick livelihoods inspires his visual and written practices. His lenses focus on the experiences of young Black adults, creative peers, and notions of urban change in cities.
He began his studio practice with the audio-visual Pesolife Art Collective at Metroland Cultures in 2020 and has intermittently contributed to the visual representations and documentations of the studios and its various artistic and public-orientated engagements. He completed his Geography (practice-related) PhD at University College London in 2023 and is now a Lecturer in Geography and Social Justice at King’s College London University.
Heiba Lamara
Since 2013 Heiba Lamara has worked as an artist-researcher exploring independent print and archival practices and publishing as a creative practice for social change. She is Assistant Editor of OOMK (One of my Kind) a zine and publishing collective focused on the spiritual, political and artistic practices of women artists.
Her focus is on self-directed project-based research around print, oral histories, archives and coloniality translating these into zines, artist books and participatory workshops and exhibitions that offer readers/participants an entry point to developing a closer relationship with underexplored topics related to the cultural history of marginalised communities. Driven to provide accessible print spaces under austerity measures, she co- founded the community Risograph print studio Rabbits Road Press in 2017.
https://www.rabbitsroadpress.com/
Other Cinemas
Other Cinemas is a film-based project initiated by Arwa Aburawa and Turab Shah to find better, more equitable ways to make and share films. The project seeks to create a deeper connection between the creation of films and their exhibition by organising free, high-quality, film events and taking them to the community in Brent. These free film screenings always showcase the work of Black and non-white filmmakers and aim to speak to, and create space for, these communities. Other Cinemas also runs a free film school for aspiring Black and non-white filmmakers to help support filmmakers and most importantly to create a space for them to work in ways that centre their voices and their communities. The film school is now running for the fourth year and the film screenings started, formally in 2019, and informally much earlier in the filmmakers’ practice. Other Cinemas also create and produce films of their own, with a focus on working collaboratively and with care.
You can keep up to date on their instagram, Arwa’s website, or the Other Cinemas website.
Tom James
Tom is an artist and writer based in Kilburn, and a current resident of Metroland Studios. He creates participatory projects where people can learn real skills, imagine new ways of living, and actually get their hands dirty to give them a try. Most of his recent work has been in response to the climate emergency, and the world we’re creating for ourselves and our children. This work started off pretty hopeless, but is getting more hopeful by the year.
His current project is Absolute Beginners: a new kind of factory in Park Royal Industrial Estate, where local young people can learn how to make everyday products in radically sustainable ways. Previous work includes The Clearing, a collaboration with Alex Hartley to create an inhabited vision of the future in the grounds of Compton Verney Art Gallery; and King’s Cross Gas Workshop, in which he turned Arts Catalyst in King’s Cross into a temporary, off-grid gas works. Tom’s work has been featured across the British press, whilst his cult fanzine about Sheffield, GO, is part of the permanent collection of the V&A.