Platform Graduate Award: This is Really Happening
Discover our selected artists as part of The Platform Graduate Award 2025, showcasing some of the most exciting emerging artists in the South.
Part of the Platform Graduate Award 2025, the exhibition features new work from Sofia Pantsjoha (University of Reading), Ella Soni (Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford), and Brontè Wyse (Oxford Brookes University).
Platform focuses on artists in the first year after graduation; a critical time when the loss of the university support structure and financial pressures can test an artist’s dedication to their practice.
This exhibition is organised and curated in partnership with associate curator, Sarah Mossop.
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Pantsjoha’s practice draws attention to the human/‘nature’ divide, exploring the life- and death- span of urban vegetal life: from sapling, tree, snag, to wood, paper, product. They imagine the experience of vegetal time-space, and by dwelling with vegetal life they look to question the hyper(re)productivity of late capitalism and its dominance over the biosphere. They surrender to an obsessive, unfocused, and multimedia way of working where research melds with pallet wood and plant materials to produce an ecosystem of works.
Soni engages with symbols of stardom and the atmosphere of anticipation that surrounds such figures. Her work makes bold proclamations to its audience in a bid to be noticed and revered. Whether through text-bearing banners, Bollywood inspired drawings and collages or celebratory sculptural forms, her varied visual practice uses accessible and scrap materials. Soni gathers these from work, on the streets and in corner shops; a site of significant inspiration and reflection in her practice.
For Soni, the corner shop represents a place of contagious possibilities that relate to her central concerns with visibility, aspiration and cultural occupancy.
Exploring themes of identity and human behaviour in relation to surveillance and privacy, Wyse makes video installations that focus on the anxiety this technology causes.
‘Where Humans Live, Rats Live’ presents a hypothetical scenario observing rats and in which Wyse uses herself as an experimental subject looking at her behaviour while under surveillance.
The installation imitates rat enclosures allowing the audience to look into it as if they’re observing rodents in a pet shop or lab. The distinctive shape references the Panopticon, a prison design that aimed to instil self-discipline through the constant possibility of surveillance.