Ian Nesbitt is a socially engaged artist, filmmaker, community activist and pedestrian based in Sheffield, UK. His work focuses on co-operation, conviviality and kinship, through a post-growth/collapse lens. Working alongside citizens, communities and the more-than-human to consider shared spaces of alterity, his work seeks to further emerging readings of these shared and entangled territories.
His projects explore ideas of commonality, working alongside citizens and communities to create spaces for exchange that are beyond the everyday. His work as a filmmaker focuses on exploring identity and community through making work collaboratively, often using chance interactions to open up personal and shared terrains.
He is a founder member of the art, film and community organisations Annexinema, Out.Side.Film, Open Kitchen Social Club and Social Art Network, and co-convened the first Social Art Summit in November 2018 in Sheffield.
He has delivered events, commissions and exhibitions for Nottingham Contemporary, In Certain Places (Preston), Millennium Galleries (Sheffield), Eastside Projects (Birmingham), Bloc Projects (Sheffield), G39 (Cardiff), Primary (Nottingham), Junction Arts (Derbyshire), Social Housing Arts Network (nationwide), The Falmouth Convention (Cornwall), and Amorph Festival (Helsinki).
His films have been selected for screening at festivals including Oberhausen, Sheffield Doc/Fest, Liverpool Biennial, Berwick Film and Media, Flatpack, Abandon Normal Devices, and Glastonbury, screened widely in galleries and artspaces nationally and internationally, and broadcast on BBC2, TVE Spain and TG4 Ireland.
Aside from working on The Book Of Visions project, he is currently 'artist-in resonance' for Dancing On The Edge's 'Year Of Listening'. He is also focusing on bringing Radio Commons into the world, a platform for sonic interventions seeking to practice solidarity by building collective agency, co-authored by an international collective of artists and broadcasters. He has also just completed a short film entitled 'Grief Is A Shapeshifter'.