The Axis Fellowship 2025 - Guest Selectors

This year we're thrilled to be working with the following artists who will help us with our Axis Fellowship selection process. 

Holly Slingsby

Image Credit: Sam Roberts

Holly Slingsby works in performance, video and painting. Her practice explores belief, and examines representations of women and their implications. Her visual language reflects a fascination with iconography, drawing on biblical imagery, mythologies, and contemporary culture. Much of her recent work seeks to convey lived experience of infertility.

Slingsby’s work has been screened, performed and exhibited at MAC Birmingham; Space52, Athens; Chapter, Cardiff; Tate St Ives; Turner Contemporary; CCC Barcelona; LABS Bologna; Matt’s Gallery; Spike Island; Modern Art Oxford; Freud Museum, London; Bòlit, Centre d'Art Contemporani, Girona; Tintype, London; DKUK, London; Art Licks Weekend; ICA, London; and the Barbican. In 2023 she was joint winner of the Exeter Contemporary Open. She is a trustee of Axis. 

Asuf Ishaq

Image Credit: Marcin Sz 

Asuf Ishaq (b.1969, Mirpur) is a multidisciplinary artist, his practice examines the post-colonial body as an archive and historical geographical places as sites of cultural and political meaning. Ishaq investigates themes of migration, embodiment, transformation, displacement, and memory. Excavating personal archives and testimonies of his family's migration experience, re-thinking traumatic episodes in history, where meaningful knowledge is located.
Ishaq works across sculpture, sound, images, text, language, moving image and installations.

Ishaq grew up in Birmingham and now works between Birmingham and London. Ishaq studied MFA Fine Art at Goldsmiths College of Art. He recently completed Axis Fellowship and residency at Hospitalfield awarded by New Contemporaries New Art Exchange Open exhibition (2024/25). Solo exhibition Articles of Home, Reid Gallery, GSA exhibitions, Glasgow (2023), Not to be a Singular Being, Chisenhale Art Place Studio, The London Open, Whitechapel Gallery, Image Behaviour Institute of Contemporary Arts London, Bloomberg New Contemporaries exhibition, South London Gallery, (2022), Groundings Film Screening, Goldsmiths CCA, London and solo exhibition and residency Inside the Country of the Skin, Stryx Gallery, Birmingham (2021).

Babeworld

Babeworld are an art collective based across Stoke-on-Trent and London. Babeworld’s work uses popular-culture inspired film, installation and sound design to interrogate themes of political and societal identity, disability, access, neurodivergence and race. By using a tongue-in-cheek approach to serious themes, Babeworld are able to playfully explore these themes whilst capturing the lived-experiences within the collective. Underpinning this work is an ongoing commitment to researching what it means to make, participate in and spectate art as marginalised individuals. Across their work, Babeworld aims to capture a life of contrast - one in which oscillating mental health, mania and delusion can make things feel hopeless and paralysing, or thrilling and obsessive.

What is the Axis Fellowship?

The Axis Fellowship 2025 is a prestigious, fully-funded development opportunity for early to mid-career artists. This initiative supports a cohort of three artists over two intensive 3-month periods: October - December 2025 and February - April 2026.

For more information, including the application form, key dates, FAQs, and submission guidelines please check the Axis Community Platform.

Members Apply now and take your artistic career to the next level with the Axis Fellowship 2025!

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Axis is an independent charity dedicated to supporting artists by extending influence, creating opportunities, and fostering good practice in the visual arts.