Meet the Artists
The Sunderland Collection Art Programme invites artists from around the world to engage with, and respond to, the collection on whatever theme and in whatever medium they wish. The Progamme hopes to form a bridge between the historic items in the collection, the present, and the future.
Each artist's jouruney culminates in an online exhibition, an offline show, a catalogue, and programming to present their new works.
The Sunderland Collection is honoured to be working with such a talented and diverse group of international artists!
Meet the Artists
© Haych Digital
Fathi Hassan (2024)
Fathi Hassan gained prominence as an artist in the 1980s and was among the first African and Arab artists to exhibit at the Venice Art Biennale in 1988. Of Nubian descent, Fathi was born in Cairo and spent over 20 years in Naples. He is currently based in Edinburgh.
Fathi works in collage, mixed media, painting, photography and installation. His work explores his own Nubian heritage and lived experience, as well as immigration and identity.
Fathi's work is held in the collections worldwide, including those of the Victoria & Albert Museum, British Museum, Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Williams College Museum of Art, Clark Museum, Cantor Arts Center, Fondazione Fausto Radici, The Farjam Collection, Barjeel Art Foundation, and the Museum of Modern Egyptian Art.
You can enjoy Fathi Hassan's response to The Sunderland Collection here in an online exhibition for Shifting Sands.
To find out about available works and limited editions, please contact arts@sunderland-collection.com
© Nathan Wolf Grace
Kristina Chan (2025)
Kristina Chan is a London-based artist working between printmaking photography, and public installation. Her practice utilises narrative and site specificity to evoke a felt history and sense of place. Inspired by post-impressionism, Japanese prints, and contemporary photography, her work explores the boundaries between individual and collective memory, and how these colliding narratives can affect our interpretation of space.
Kristina's works are a culmination and accumulation into site specific history to depict socio-cultural entropic narratives. They explore the correlation between architecture and sculptural landscapes of derelict and disused spaces.
Canadian born, Kristina has exhibited globally, most notably at the Musée du Louvre during the 5th Annual Exposure Award Black and White Collection. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum, Ingram Collection of British and Modern Art, the Royal Collection Clarence House, and the Royal College of Art.
Click the link to explore the online exhibition for Habitable Climes, Kristina Chan's response to The Sunderland Collection.
To find out about available works and limited editions, please contact arts@sunderland-collection.com
© Simon Bejer
Simon Bejer (2026)
Born in Melbourne and based in London and Bordeaux, Bejer studied fine art and stage design. His extensive experience as a designer for theatre has remained influential as he returned to his artistic practice which now incorporates painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking and installation.
Play, wonder and absurdity are central to his approach with which he investigates past and present ideas of taste, beauty and the picturesque. Bejer’s practice engages in the mash-up of visual languages which so characterises contemporary life, blurring the boundaries between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, kitschiness and refinement, history and modernity.
Landscapes feature prominently in his paintings through which he explores concepts of change, loss, and the uncertain dichotomy between nature and the human. These themes reappear in his sculpture, where he pushes material experimentation, combining unusual and incongruous elements to dramatic, and often humorous effect. Playing off one another, Bejer’s two and three dimensional works allow him to construct complex spatial dynamics, as well as a sense of drama and decorative spectacle.
In 2022, he graduated with a MFA from the City & Guilds Art School, London. From 2022 to 2023 he held the Decorative Surfaces Fellowship of the Worshipful Company of Painter-Stainers. His work has been exhibited in group exhibitions in the UK, Australia, the US and Hong Kong as well as solo shows in Taipei and London.
© Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London. Photo: Axel Dupeux
Tammy Nguyen
Tammy Nguyen creates paintings, drawings, artist books, prints, and zines that explore the intersections between geopolitics, ecology, and lesser-known histories. A story teller born in San Francisco and working is Easton CT, Nguyen’s multidisciplinary practice takes two forms—her more traditional fine arts practice, which encompasses her lush, dense paintings, as well as her prints, drawings, and unique artist books, and her publishing practice, embodied through her imprint, Passenger Pigeon Press, which creates and distributes Martha’s Quarterly, a subscription of artist books and interdisciplinary collaborations.
Across both domains Nguyen’s work aims to unsettle, and the tension between the artist’s elegant forms and harmonious aesthetics often belies the nature of her content. The confusion this dissonance creates becomes generative, opening space for re-evaluation, radical thinking, and the dislodging of complacency.
Many of Nguyen’s paintings expand from her unique artist books, often through engagement with similar themes, questions, or investigations. Throughout her work she has explored a range of topics and ideas, including the Bandung conference, the first large-scale Afro-Asian conference which was attended by world leaders from 29 non-aligned countries during the Cold War, Forest City, a sprawling off-shore development project in Malaysia, and the red-shanked douc langur, an endangered species of monkey native to Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia.
At its core, Nguyen’s, collaborative, research-based practice is propositional, exploring ideas and conjectures for ways of looking at the past, examining the present, and imagining possible futures. Nguyen addresses the question of how one reads, both visually and linguistically, and she considers the idea of multiple narratives being told simultaneously, held together by the edges of her compositions or spines of her books.
© Haych Digital
Sara van der Beek
Sara van der Beek lives and works in Brooklyn, New York where she investigates our collective and evolving relationship with photography and the photographic image. Recent work has focused on contemporary museological practices of collection and display. Within this context, Sara highlights women’s ongoing contributions to the larger material and visual cultures upon which institutional collections and art historical narratives are built.
Her solo exhibitions include at Metro Pictures, New York; Black Mountain College Museum, Asheville, NC; the Minneapolis Institute of Art; the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland; the Foundazione Memmo, Rome; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and the Whitney Museum of Art, New York NY.
Sara's work is in art collections worldwide including the Baltimore Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, Carnegie Museum of Art, Dallas Museum of Art, Guggenheim Museum New York, ICA Boston, MoCA Los Angeles, MoMA New York, and The Whitney Museum of American Art. She is a recipient of a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2022) and a Pollock- Krasner Foundation grant (2023).
© Courtesy of Rossi & Rossi Gallery
Tenzing Rigdol
Tenzing Rigdol is a Tibetan-American contemporary artist, poet, and filmmaker, from Kathmandu, Nepal.
He pursued his academic studies at the University of Colorado Denver, where he was later conferred an honorary doctorate in 2022. In addition to his formal education, Rigdol received traditional training in Tibetan thanka painting and sand mandala art, foundational disciplines that continue to inform his creative practice.
His multidisciplinary works have been exhibited internationally, including the landmark installation Biography of a Thought at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
In 2013, Rigdol’s Pin Drop Silence became the first artwork by a Tibetan-American artist to be acquired by The Met’s permanent collection, marking a historic milestone. Rigdol shares a deep commitment to cultural preservation, artistic innovation, and intercultural dialogue.
He presently divides his time between Nepal, India, and New York City, actively contributing to the evolving global discourse on contemporary art.
© Philipp Rupp
Douglas Mandry
Douglas is a Swiss artist based in Zurich. A graduate of ECAL (École cantonale d’art de Lausanne), he works across a range of mediums to investigate the complex relationship between humans and the natural world. His practice draws on fields such as archaeology, technology, history, and the natural sciences, often in collaboration with researchers and institutions. Through this dialogue between disciplines, Douglas explores the porous boundaries between art and science.
At the heart of his work lies an alchemical approach to materials, where the transformation of existing elements becomes a central part of the creative process. In doing so, he redefines the role of the artist — moving away from the notion of sole creator towards a more collaborative engagement with materials and forces.
Douglas' work has been exhibited at C/O Berlin, Foam Amsterdam, the Victoria & Albert Museum, Kunst Haus Wien, and the Centre de la Photographie Genève, among others. In 2025, he published his second artist book, A Distant Smell of Dust, which was nominated for the Swiss Design Awards.
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