zack mennell is an artist working across performance, analogue photography, writing, film and installation. Their work begins with hauntings - images, phrases and materials that persist - and follows them through slowness, improvisation and doing. Working through queerness, madness, institutionalisation, ecology, class and desire, they are drawn to what leaks between categories: body and landscape, archive and fantasy, shame and joy, document and skin.
Using film, found matter, text, cloth, mud and other unstable materials, mennell makes work that lingers in the space between trace and transformation. Analogue processes are central: they allow error, contamination and decay to remain visible, keeping the image porous and unresolved. Figures emerge not quite as characters but as pressures taking form - strange hosts, second skins, bodies shaped by private intensities and public systems.
Returning often to archives, polluted landscapes and damaged surfaces, mennell is interested in what remains: residue, coded gesture, partial contact, misrecognition, desire. Their work can be messy, intense and a little strange, but it is never simply about disturbance. It seeks a charged kind of connection - a way for something difficult, excessive or half-hidden to appear without being pinned down.
Education & Professional Development
The Other MA (TOMA), The Old Waterworks, Southend-on-Sea - 2024-2025.
STEP UP Photography Course, Photofusion, Brixton - 2024.
ACE DYCP Grant, self-initiated development in analogue photography and moving image - 2023.
A-N Bursary, training in analogue darkroom and eco-processing methods - 2023.
The Sunday Skool for Misfits, Experimenters and Dissenters, VSSL Studio - 2021.
Liberal Arts (English Major), Higher Certificate, King’s College London - 2014-2019.
Community Arts Management Advanced Level Apprenticeship, South Essex College, Southend - 2012-2014.
Supported Fellowships & Residencies
ArtsAdmin Lab Residency, London - November 2025.
Venice Biennale Fellow, British Council x Outside In - September 2025.
Studio 459 Tomar Residency, Portugal - April 2025.
Metal Culture R&D Residency, Liverpool - January 2025.
Othona Community Artist Residency, Essex - November 2024.
New Dialogues Artist Research Fellowship, Outside In x British Art Network (online) - 2024.
Eco Somatic Arts Residency, Isle Martin, Scotland, Intercultural Roots - September 2023.
Seeding Space, London Performance Studios with Leon Clowes - August 2023.
Martin O’Brien’s This Unending (again, again, again); Wellcome Collection (London) - June 2026.
Martin O’Brien’s What the Serpent Told Me in the Misty Gloom; Tate Britain (London) - November 2025.
Duckie’s Summer Splash at Happy Valley Pride, Hebden Bridge (Yorkshire) - July 2025.
Martin O’Brien‘s Fading Out of Dead Air (Transmissions for the Necropolis); A Collective Archive, Ugly Duck (London)- June 2025.
Rage Reactor; DadaFest International 40, The Bluecoat (Liverpool) - March 2025.
Blood, Tears, Piss, and Spunk; Rat Park by Duckie, Vauxhall (London) - February 2025.
spit it out; Martin O’Brien’s DISCHARGE by Future Ritual, Ugly Duck (London) - March 2024.
Martin O’Brien’s An Ambulance to the Future (The Second Chance); Whitechapel Gallery (London); Live Art Denmark, Warehouse 9, Toaster (Copenhagen) - May 2023 to March 2024.
Martin O’Brien’s Fading Out of Dead Air (Transmissions for the Necropolis); Whitechapel Gallery (London) - December 2023.
Hjemom; Collective Performance led by VestAndPage, Hamar Performance Festival, Kunstbanken (Hamar, Norway) - October 2023.
(para)site: perturbing the convalescent; Excappare by Cerebellum Arts, Coastal Currents Festival (Hastings, Sussex) - October 2023.
Martin O’Brien’s Overture For The End (An Ashen Place); Whitechapel Gallery (London) - July 2023.
(para)site: a blockage; Pipe Dreams, Chisenhale Studios & Goldsmiths University, (Bethnal Green, London) - April 2023.
(para)site: a discharge of cultural sewage; VSSL studio, Totally Thames Festival & Deptford X Festival (Deptford, London) - September 2022.
(para)site: taking the piss; Runt of The Litter (Hackney), hArtslane (New Cross), Live Art Club (Deptford) - May to August 2022.
Martin O’Brien’s The Last Breath Society: Coughing Coffin; Wellcome Trust, Birkbeck University, Institute of Contemporary Art (Westminster, London) - August 2021.
COMMON HOST; Future Ritual, Peckham Safehouses (London) - March 2026.
Rage Reactor; DadaFest International 40, The Bluecoat (Liverpool) - March 2025.
Whistling As The Night Calls; with Martin O’Brien, VSSL studio and Future Ritual (Deptford, London) - October - December 2024.
Portals and Constellations; Venice International Performance Art Week with VestAndPage, Future Ritual, and Performance Art Video at Palazzo Mora (Venice, Italy) - December 2024.
(para)site: a discharge of cultural sewage; VSSL studio, Totally Thames Festival & Deptford X Festival (Deptford, London) - September 2022.
Future Ritual Festival, Institute of Contemporary Art (London) - May 2022.
Mythic Time by VestAndPage and Joseph Morgan Schofield; Future Ritual, ]performance s p a c e[ (Folkestone) - September 2021.
these teeming forms by Joseph Morgan Schofield; ]performance s p a c e[ (Folkestone), Institute of Contemporary Art, VSSL studio, Chisenhale Studios (London) - July-September 2021.
Gathering in a Time of Plague, VSSL studio (London) - April to August 2021.
between crisis and stasis I wait by Joseph Morgan Schofield; TactileBOSCH (Cardiff) - November 2019.
a sea change; Baiba Sprance, Marco Berardi, Leon Clowes, Future Ritual - 2026.
(para)site; Baiba Sprance, VSSL studio, Totally Thames Festival, Fringe Film Festival, Deptford X - 2022.
down river, down; 16mm film experiment - 2022.
the relative distance between the front door and me; Broken Grey Wires, Proforma, HOME Manchester - 2020.
Publication
Confronting Mortality Through Photography - in About Photography Blog - 2024.
there are scratchy woollen jumpers under my skin — in Birdsong from Inobservable Worlds; Dolly Sen in partnership with Unlimited & The Wellcome Trust - 2024.
sal(i)vation — in FDBN...MOURNING; Sticky Fingers Publishing - 2023.
Art as Doing — in Performing Recovery Magazine - 2023.
PSX: a decade of performance art in the UK; ]performance s p a c e[ - 2021.
nightsweats, poetry and illustration after thom gunn; Guillaume Vandame & SET - 2020.