Announcing the Artists Selected for Artsadmin’s Lab Residencies Autumn 2025
We are excited to announce the 2025 cohort of artists joining our curated residency programme at Toynbee Studios this autumn.
The Artsadmin Lab supports early-stage artistic development, offering time and space for artists to explore and develop new live and interdisciplinary work focused on social and environmental justice.
The 2025 cohort includes:
- Sara Rahman
- Elana Binysh
- zack mennell
Together, this cohort will undertake their residencies alongside one another, benefiting from shared time, space, and opportunity to engage both individually and collectively.
Each selected artist will receive free rehearsal or studio space at Toynbee Studios and a stipend. They’ll also receive dedicated support and mentorship from the Artsadmin programme team.
Artists will also be invited to join the Lab Alumni Network, which provides further opportunities to participate in future networking events, present work at Lab Alumni Sharings and access Artsadmin opportunities and resources.
We can’t wait to welcome all 3 artists to Toynbee Studios for the Lab residencies and to see each project develop!
Selected Artists
Elana Binysh
Elana Binysh is an interdisciplinary artist working across sound, writing + the internet. She creates sensory environments for audiences to give themselves over to + be swallowed up by. Her work uses Crip theory + experimental form to think about transgression + grossness. Her first solo work I think it was a feeling is an instruction based headphone piece designed to be followed at home, alone. It’s a playful exploration of incontinence, control & sensation. She often works collaboratively, and her work has been shown at Bristol Old Vic, The Yard, V&A + Prague Quadrennial.
“I’ll be spending the time at Artsadmin exploring aspects of my new project. I want to think about what it means to perform this work to a live audience, and instruct people live. I’ll spend one week looking at my persona, thinking about sub/dom/switch dynamics between me and the audience. The other week will be spent looking at my access needs as creative tools for performance. For example: if I need a loo break in the middle of a show, how can I play with leaving an audience alone? My time at Artsadmin is going to be led by the process. I’ll be writing, making sound and doing improvisation and fooling exercises.” – Elana
zack mennell
zack mennell (b. 1994, Hornchurch UK) is a self-taught emerging artist using writing, photography and performance to explore queerness and neurodiversity in relation to presence and visibility. zack frequently collaborates with performance artist Martin O’Brien performing throughout the UK and in Europe. zack has regularly works documenting performance and live events through photography. Their photographic practice is strictly analogue. zack is a member of the GLA Liberty Advisary Group, a 2025 British Council Venice Biennale Fellow, and a studio holder at Triangle LGBTQ+ Cultural Centre. They are a member of the TOMA (The Other MA) 2024/25 cohort, an alternative MFA based in Southend-on-Sea.
“During the residency, I want to interrogate ideas of in/visibility, un/presence and illumination (which relate to my experiences of madness, institutionalisation and growing up queer and working class) through developing a practice of ‘photo-performing’. Having been a photographer and a performer, my aim is to bring these two disciplines into dialogue — not as performance to camera, but as an active exchange where both image and performer co-exist as collaborators. A central question is how the liveness of performance can be embodied through photographic processes and communicated to an audience.” – zack
Sara Rahman
Sara Rahman (Sarah Ourahmane) is a British Algerian musician, composer, sound-artist and researcher. Her practice spans classical contemporary composition, electronic music, performance, and improvisation as a vocalist and cellist. Engaging with the intersections of sonic anthropology, research and performance, she explores the gaps between tradition and ritual in authoritarianism contexts. Her works have been released on 3024 and commissioned by BBC, Sound and Music, the British Music Collection, Sculpture International Rotterdam and she has exhibited at Forma Arts Media, Somerset House, MACBA, Barcelona and worked on exhibitions at the Castello di Rivoli and OGR, Turin.
“During the Artsadmin residency, I will explore the possibility of composition as choreography by the way of hybrid drums, designed and created in collaboration with local drum makers across Algeria and Fuzhou (Southern China) to reimagine drum and rhythmic dissonance as a form of sobremesa, typical in flamenco improvised exchange.” – Sara