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. “Artistic expression is, for me, a way to make sense of the world and an attempt to contextualise who I am within it. In stepping into difficulty and pain through artmaking, I attempt to understand life through a different register to that of daily survival. I want my work to have an uncanny quality, that it might temporarily unsettle familiar places, making visible some of the strange aspects and tensions embedded there.” In 2022, they presented the first iteration of their ongoing project ‘(para)site’ at VSSL Studio during Totally Thames Festival and Deptford X. Originally commissioned by Thames Festival Trust, ‘(para)site’ explores post-industrial ecologies & toxic representations of disability & working class identity. The project continues this Autumn with a new film made in the Thames Estuary, supported by ACE. In 2023, zack received a DYCP grant to explore sustainable & alternative photographic dark room techniques. A series of photographic works, made in collaboration with performance artist Martin O’Brien, was exhibited by Future Ritual in 2024. Their most recent performance work ‘Rage Reactor’, entwining the ecological impact of the civil nuclear industry with the complex legacy of ‘nuclear’ family structures, was commissioned by DaDaFest international, and supported by Duckie, Metal Liverpool and ACE. 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
@zackmennell
