Lander Talks

Explain to me what you do like I'm five years old.

I work in art where artists use technology and space instead of paint and canvas. A lot of this art only exists for a short time and afterwards, you can only see it in photos and videos. My job is to help make it happen: sometimes by curating or producing a project, sometimes by bringing the right artists into it. These days I mostly work on the artist’s side, helping with everything from production to getting a visa for the next exhibition.

What are you working on right now?

Right now, my attention goes in three directions: curation, education and Papillon’s, the agency I started a year ago. For now, it’s a one-person agency — I do everything, including social media and that actually feels very natural. The roster is small, but I’m incredibly proud of it: TUNDRA, Riccardo Giovinetto, and a few friends I work with project by project.

How did you get here?

12 years ago I started as a VJ, but pretty quickly became more curious about the bigger picture, so I moved into production at multimedia studios and galleries, and later became a co-founder and curator of Intervals festival. At some point I realised I’d spent most of my career on the organiser’s side and wanted to understand how to support artists better. So I joined a course by Berlin-based agency LittleBig with the idea of bringing some of the music industry’s agency culture into media art. It turned out to be not quite as simple in practice, but that’s what makes it interesting.

What was the moment you nearly stopped and what kept you going?

Leaving Intervals after building it from scratch for seven years was a big reset. Moving first from Russia to Turkey, and later to the UK, made it an even bigger one. What got me moving again, I think, was the fact that this field keeps changing, so there’s always something new to explore — and, unexpectedly, teaching. Working with students and sharing what I know online and through educational programmes gave me my confidence back, and eventually artists started finding me through those same channels. Papillon’s grew very organically from there.

What do you know now that you wish was common knowledge?

Burnout doesn’t always mean you need to leave your industry and start again from zero. Sometimes you just need to change your position inside it. The same field can suddenly become interesting again from a completely different role. And all the experience and relationships you’ve built come with you.

What are you building towards that doesn't exist yet?

A proper Papillon’s project in the UK. I’m used to working internationally and remotely, but I also want to make things happen on the ground where I actually live — and the UK has been surprisingly difficult to crack. Now it’s finally becoming tangible: one project with our artists is already at an important stage for next year, and from September 12 hilights.studio will show a video artwork on a public screen in Sunderland, supported by Papillon’s. Step by step.

Explain what you do to me like I'm five years old.

Picture this: loads of empty shops and offices just sitting there, doing nothing. I find them and turn them into free studios and galleries for artists who need the space, in return for free events and exhibitions for local communities.

Then some of that art gets sold, and the money goes straight back into giving more artists more space.

What are you working on right now?

Right now, we've just offered six central London galleries to artists to use during the busiest — and, if you're renting somewhere to show art, most expensive — time of the year.

We've selected the artists and we're now creating a really exciting programme of exhibitions and events for everyone to come to.

How did you get here?

Galleries, private collections, being a freelance curator. At some point I realised there were a lot of incredibly talented people who simply weren't being given the opportunities to show what they do, or make what they want to make.

And I believe that art's true value isn't its market value, but the value it brings to society.

Artists are important. Being engaged with art is important. And the art world has historically been very good at gatekeeping both access and opportunity.

So I thought I'd try to fix a bit of that myself, and started Hypha in 2021.

What was the moment you nearly stopped and what kept you going?

The hardest bit, honestly, was right at the start. Just trying to make ends meet while you're launching something from nothing is brutal. Nobody really talks about how brutal that is.

But slowly it started working. We had proof that it could actually happen.

And then the bit that really got me was walking into these spaces once they'd been activated and seeing what happened there — things I never could have predicted. Different communities, different cultures, just given room to actually flourish.

That's the bit that's pure magic, and that's what kept me going.

What do you know now that you wish was common knowledge?

For landlords, it's that artists add enormous value to a property — not necessarily financially, but in terms of what they bring to a place and the community around it. There's often an assumption that artists will be difficult to work with, or that they'll damage a property. In our experience, that's just not true.

And the same goes in reverse. Landlords, developers and councils aren't entities that artists need to be scared of.

A big part of Hypha's role is simply brokering those relationships and getting two worlds that don't always understand each other to work together.

What are you building towards that doesn't exist yet?

I'd love Hypha to work internationally, so that UK artists could take over spaces in other countries and artists from those countries could come and work here.

Ultimately, I'd like to build a network of spaces that allows artists, ideas and cultures to move between cities and countries — without access being determined by who can afford the rent.

Explain what you do to me like I'm five years old.

I build new things. I’ve built a music channel, a virtual reality studio, a social good award and a school for startups to name a few. I’m really interested in entrepreneurship, art and impact and somehow keep finding new ways to work across all three.

Does a 5 year old know what entrepreneurship is?

What are you working on right now?

I’m currently building a professional community for creative women. When I started my own company 8 years ago, I was totally alone trying to figure out what to do. I tried to join a bunch of different groups but none of them felt quite right for me. This space is for women going through that now, and offers connections, support and real talk from others going through it as well. It’s kind of like the conversations you’d have at a dinner party or over WhatsApp but as an online community.

How did you get here?

I actually started as a documentary filmmaker. From there I was a singer in a band and ran an indie record label. After that, I started a professional career in media and worked my way up to become an executive. And then, I started my own consulting practice.

Now I want to create support systems for women who are building their own creative careers and businesses.

What was the moment you nearly stopped and what kept you going?

There’s so many. I’m a firm believer that you don’t learn by thinking but by doing. So failure is basically like a daily occurrence for me. I also tend to think of it more like evolving than giving up. I’ve had something like 4 careers already and just keep moving from one thing to the next in these ~7 year loops. It doesn’t feel like quitting but more like growing.

What do you know now that you wish was common knowledge?

You don’t have to follow one specific path to be successful. And you don’t have to be anyone other than exactly who you are to get there. I’ve seen a lot of creative people kind of opt out because they just couldn’t see the path for themselves. I went to art school, I never even thought I’d have a full-time job let alone be an exec or run my own company.

I think my experience has taught me that you can absolutely stay 100% true to who you are and what you are interested in and build a life that works for you.

What are you building towards that doesn't exist yet?

Wow ok, I do kind of have this one big crazy idea. What if we built out a platform that could totally disrupt LinkedIn and the job application industrial complex. It would be a marketplace with personal referrals, founder matchmaking, mentors, solo-business growth programs, all for different types and stages of work. Basically it would build out all this infrastructure for making women tons and tons and tons of money.

I’m kind of loving my life right now though and don’t know if I have the energy to do it by myself. Anyone want to help with that?

Explain what you do to me like I'm five years old.

I make things with my hands and create special places where people can see, hear and feel something new.

Sometimes I use pictures, sometimes sounds, and sometimes I make things out of wax, clay or other materials. I like to see how these things change when I work with them, and how they make people feel.

When I was little, I loved drawing with black ink. Now I like trying lots of different things.

I want people to walk into a place I've made, feel something they haven't felt before, and walk out feeling a little different.

Grown-ups call this being a multidisciplinary artist. I just like exploring different ways of making people feel something.

What are you working on right now?

I'm currently finishing the production of my exhibition La Petite Mort, opening on 13 November at Cut Art Gallery in Riga, Latvia.

The project began with an exhibition four years ago and eventually became my book 5-Minute Bedtime Stories, published by Skira at the end of last year. Now I'm revisiting it, creating several new works and reimagining the exhibition as an immersive ritual of divorce.

We have so many rituals to celebrate marriage, but almost none to mark its end. Yet divorce is also a rite of passage — a separation from a former identity, a period of grief and transformation, and eventually the rediscovery of oneself. For this exhibition, I'm creating my own rituals, drawing on my personal mythology, the body, sexuality and the ways we process loss.

I was approached about the exhibition only recently, so the production schedule has been quite intense. But Latvia felt like a particularly meaningful place for this project. I lived there for several years, and interestingly, it has the highest divorce rate in the European Union. In fact, Latvia also has one of the highest marriage rates in the EU, which makes this contrast even more fascinating.

I'm working with a wonderful curator and team to bring together earlier pieces and several new works, exploring how the end of a marriage can become not only a form of mourning, but also a moment of liberation and self-reclamation.

How did you get here?

For as long as I can remember, I wanted to be an artist. But at 17, faced with a choice between studying graphic art on a scholarship and pursuing a career in communications, I chose the latter. I simply couldn't imagine how to make a living as an artist. A very sensible decision for a 17-year-old.

Then, in 2019, I visited the Venice Biennale and had this overwhelming feeling of coming home. I was completely captivated by the installations, and one question wouldn't leave me alone: why had I spent so many years doing anything other than art?

I went on to study at Sotheby's and Goldsmiths, and within a year and a half, I left behind a successful career in communications to become a full-time artist.

Since then, it's been a rather intense journey of exhibitions, rejections, persistence and a few wonderful milestones, including my first biennial at the Courtauld in London.

For a while, I had this ridiculous personal KPI of trying to make my artistic age catch up with my biological age. Eventually, I relaxed. I've realised that I'll probably be making art for the rest of my life. Not because I enjoy it, although I do, but because I simply can't not do it. The ideas and images stay in my head until I bring them into the world.

What was the moment you nearly stopped and what kept you going?

I don't think there was one particular moment. In a way, I face reasons to quit all the time. Coming from a business background, I often feel that none of my KPIs are being met.

I remember studying Art and Business at Sotheby's, before making my full transition into art, and coming across a statistic suggesting that around 80% of MFA graduates couldn't earn enough from their art to even cover the cost of their materials. I was horrified. How many accountants do we know who can't afford a laptop to prepare their annual reports?

Unfortunately, that's the cruel reality of the art world. So many talented artists have to work in other fields just to finance their artistic practice.

What keeps me going? Probably sheer stubbornness. When I want something, I tend to keep moving towards it. Rejection, lack of support and constant uncertainty can be incredibly painful. And I don't think that pain ever becomes entirely comfortable.

But I've learned that the only way forward is to keep working, keep trying new things and keep putting yourself out there.

What do you know now that you wish was common knowledge?

That time works differently in the art world. It's not linear, and it certainly doesn't follow the logic of business.

Coming from communications, I was used to setting goals, measuring progress and expecting results within a reasonable timeframe. You can build a successful start-up in three years, but in art, three years might be just the beginning of a conversation.

It took me a while to understand that artistic careers have their own strange rhythm. You can work for years without much recognition, and then something you made long ago suddenly becomes relevant. Progress isn't always visible, and it rarely happens when you expect it.

I wish I'd understood this earlier. It would have saved me a lot of frustration and helped me trust the process rather than constantly trying to measure it.

What are you building towards that doesn't exist yet?

I'm interested in the moments when memory breaks down. Like an electrical circuit where one connection suddenly stops working. Why does something disappear from memory? Why are certain experiences never spoken about, certain stories never passed on, certain rituals never created? I look for these missing links — in memory, knowledge and ritual — and try to understand where and why the connection was broken. That's often where my artistic projects begin.

One of the projects I'm starting to work on now explores the gendered politics of suffering and remembrance. For two thousand years, Western culture has elevated male suffering into something sacred, while the suffering of women in childbirth — an experience through which humanity itself continues — has rarely received comparable recognition.

In Aztec culture, a woman who died in childbirth was honoured like a warrior who died in battle. Yet in the Western tradition, we have built an entire visual and religious language around male suffering, while the pain and dangers of childbirth are often treated as simply an ordinary part of being a woman.

Why do we have so many monuments commemorating men who died in battle, but so few honouring women who died giving birth? Why is one form of suffering considered heroic or sacred, while the other is taken for granted?

This is the new artistic project I'm beginning to develop, and one of my biggest artistic ambitions.