On Our Radar: Artists to Watch in Spring 2026

Kat Anderson

Kat Anderson (b. 1980) is a visual artist, musician and filmmaker from Bristol, now based in London. She works within a research-based artistic framework she calls ‘Episodes of Horror’, which uses the genre of horror to discuss historic and contemporary representations of mental illness and trauma as experienced by or projected upon Black bodies in media and society more generally.

As part of her current Fellowship at the Stanley Pickey Gallery, London, Anderson is developing a new video installation How to Make and Unmake a Monster which examines the relationship between ‘conceptual and physical thresholds’, the ‘physics of Blackness’ and the ‘creation of monsters’. Anderson posits the Black African diasporic body as a site of assumed ‘amoral antagonism’ in Euro-American societies – othered, racialised, and transformed into a ‘thing’ or ‘non-being’. The artist’s ongoing research seeks to paradoxically recuperate Black African personhood through a study of these conditions in the visual language of horror films. As Anderson explains, ‘the racism I witnessed and lived in the UK often felt indistinguishable from what I saw in horror films ... If discomfort arises, I hope people sit with it rather than turn away. Discomfort can be a powerful teacher.’ 

Anderson’s 2019 video work John is featured in the 2026 edition of New Contemporaries. Her past exhibitions include Mark of Cane at Nunnery Gallery, London (2024), the Aesthetica Art Prize, York Art Gallery (2022), and Restraint Restrained, Block 336, London (2019). In 2023, Anderson was the inaugural winner of the East London Art Prize, awarded by Bow Arts, London. In 2019, she was awarded the Jerwood New Work Fund. Her work has been featured in Transmissions TV, Third Horizon Film Festival, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, and has been acquired by Wellcome Collection. 

Steph Huang

Steph Huang (b.1990) is a London-based Taiwanese artist whose practice explores themes of labour, value, and commerce through the cultural biographies of everyday objects and spaces. Working across sculpture, installation, film, and sound, she transforms commonplace materials into minimalist yet poetically resonant installations.  

Huang's work uncovers the historical and transcultural narratives embedded within consumer culture while critically examining its environmental and human costs. By merging handmade elements with readymade objects, she illuminates the surreal contradictions of capitalism and invites viewers to reexamine their relationship to consumption. Having grown up in Taiwan and lived in London for over a decade, Huang offers nuanced critiques of globalisation and belonging – proposing alternative perspectives and thoughtful recontextualisations that challenge mainstream narratives around consumption and commerce.  

Huang has recently presented a number of exhibitions across Asia and Europe, including Grafting in the Encounters sector at Art Basel Hong Kong (2026); When An Encounter Takes Place at Perrotin Tokyo (2025); Sounds of Babel – Talking Tins at C-Lab Taipei (2025); and Lili Deli at Taipei Fine Arts Museum (2025). These follow her first institutional commission See, See, Sea at Tate Britain (2024), which developed her ongoing investigation into global trade, food systems, and the interactions between incidental materials through a careful study of the fishing industry in Devon and London. 

Zahra Malkani

Zahra Malkani (b. 1986) is a multidisciplinary artist, researcher and educator from Karachi, Pakistan. Her practice is rooted in collaboration, pedagogy and long-term research, unfolding across sound, installation, text and moving image. Central to her work is an attention to the politics of development, dispossession and infrastructural violence, approached through dissident ecological knowledges and traditions of environmental resistance. 

Working closely with field recordings, oral histories and collective study, Malkani’s practice foregrounds sonic and embodied forms of knowledge that emerge from sites of ecological struggle. Across her work, listening becomes both a method and a political act – one that connects everyday environments in Karachi’s coastal and riverine ecologies to wider histories of colonial extraction, militarisation and the climate crisis.

A significant strand of her practice is her co-founding of Karachi LaJamia with Shahana Rajani – an experimental, nomadic pedagogical platform that operates outside institutional frameworks. Karachi LaJamia convenes site-specific courses and collective research practices in public spaces across Karachi, engaging directly with ongoing struggles around land, water and environmental justice, and rethinking arts education as a shared and situated political practice. 

Recent exhibitions and projects have extended these concerns into increasingly immersive sonic and spatial installations. At Konsthall C in Stockholm, Sada Sada (2025) presented an expansive sound installation composed of field recordings of mourning, protest and environmental soundscapes from coastal Pakistan. Her most recent solo exhibition, Noorani Metal Sound at Auto Italia (2026), expands this sonic methodology into an immersive installation environment combining sound, sculpture and moving image. The exhibition draws on years of research into spiritual and ecological traditions of resistance along Pakistan’s coastal and delta regions, weaving together devotional sound, protest, and archival material to examine the entanglement of environmental devastation and cultural memory. 

Zayd Menk

Zayd Menk (b. 2000) is a London-based interdisciplinary artist who works primarily with sculpture and installation. His practice explores the idea of technology as a hyperobject – a term for systems so vast in scale that they can’t be fully perceived or understood. At the core of his work are inquiries into material infrastructure, intangible data, and human agency in the face of a world defined and dictated through our engagement with machines.

Using found objects and salvaged computer components as his primary material, Menk creates sprawling installations and sculptural systems that confront the paradoxes inherent in our relationships with technology. Resisting the tendency to conceal or otherwise smooth away the masses of cables and devices that envelop contemporary life, Menk renders technological infrastructure as a mutable expanse of electronic waste. He is also preoccupied with the electromagnetic spectrum: invisible frequencies and signals that saturate everyday experience while remaining largely imperceptible. 

Menk has recently shown mixed media sculptures in the group shows Cardboard House at the Palmer Gallery, London, and The Bed Sitting Room at Lomex, New York (both 2026). In 2025, his solo exhibition mut[e]://tations at St. Chads Penton Rise saw the artist install a dense environment of splintered wood, suspended screens, shattered disk drives and a knotted web of assorted cableage. Menk is also an alumnus of New Contemporaries (2023). 

Gray Wielebinski 

Gray Wielebinski (b. 1991) is a Dallas-born, London-based multidisciplinary artist working across installation, sculpture, painting and moving image. His practice draws on myth-making, queer identity, militarised aesthetics and science fiction to construct immersive environments that interrogate how power, nationhood and the body are shaped through narrative and image systems. Collage – both as medium and methodology – lies at the core of his practice, allowing him to fragment, reassemble, and subvert dominant iconographies and systems of beliefs rooted in American history, mythology and popular culture. 

At Frieze London 2025 with Nicoletti Contemporary, Wielebinski presented a new series of works that furthered his investigation into the aestheticisation of violence. Alluding to a fairground shooting booth, the display brought together resin sculptures cast from gun grips alongside mosaic-like panels composed of ceramic tiles used in the production of ballistic armour. Similarly, in Present Tense (2024), a group show at Hauser & Wirth Somerset, he exhibited a series of sculptural works modelled on shooting targets, reflecting an ongoing fascination with what he has described as the ‘unintentional beauty and intentional abstraction of violence.’ 

Wielebinski presented his solo exhibition The Red Sun is High, the Blue Low at the ICA, London (2023), where he transformed the gallery into a psychologically charged, immersive environment exploring simulation, game theory, and systems of control. Of course I know eternity (2025) at the Austrian Cultural Forum, London, saw Wielebinski’s installations brought into dialogue with the collages of Wilhelm Traeger, using the latter medium as a shared methodology to explore nonlinear histories, intergenerational exchange and the ways time is constructed and experienced The 2025 artist book Pack, published by Lichen Books, assembles over 200 of Wielebinski’s full-page collages.