Kinga Oktabska (b. 1995) is a visual artist from Wroclaw, Poland.

She graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2022, completed a Design for Set & Screen degree at UAL, receiving a Theatre Design Prize at Wimbledon College of Art in 2018 and was awarded a Global Design Diploma at IED Barcelona Escola Superior de Disseny in 2015.

Her work explores transformations of urban landscapes against the background of social, cultural, political and economic change. She interprets space as palimpsest: a composition of layers of time engraved in matter. Her artistic practice, embedded in the experience of space, aims to reconstruct the narrative of a place written in physical traces and signs that have been erased, imagined or that are invisible to the eye. She is interested in applying process-based work as a research methodology to tell stories of change, observing temporality, permanence and cyclicality in landscapes.

Public Programme

The location of the space allows her greater opportunities to communicate and include local residents in her work about the local area. She uses the space as a platform for dialogue with local community members to inform her practice. As part of this, she wants to run an event featuring talks with local historians about the lost heritage of Battersea. Additionally, she hosts drawing workshops with local residents to represent their memories of the area. She also has run a ‘Silk and Rubble’ workshop exploring industrial heritage and the lost crafts of the Battersea Seashore. She would like to invite people to create a collaborative drawing and later make prints of it to give away in the form of postcards or posters.

Katy Wan, Assistant Curator, International Art at Tate Modern and Simon Tate, Managing Director of Wetherby

Katy Wan is Assistant Curator, International Art at Tate Modern, delivering across the range of exhibitions and displays, as well as acquisitions of international photography and art from the Asia and Pacific region.

Simon Tate is the Managing Director of Wetherby, a private property development and investment company based in London. Simon set up his own devleopment company in 2007 where schemes included Riverbank House, a 30,000sqm headquarters building in the City designed by David Walker Architects and pre-let to Man Group in partnership with Pace Investments.