Nina Wakeford is an artist based in London and Brighton whose work through performance, installation and the moving image, explores modes of identification with historical materials – often from the social movements of the 1970s and 1980s – and relates them to public infrastructures such as tunnels, roadways, protest camps and libraries.

For several years she has worked through the spirit of ‘feminist political ambivalence’, a term devised by feminist Clare Hemmings, which combines ideas of affects, fantasy and knowledge to explore how over/attachments might be made to historical feminist thinking, particularly where tensions and problems in writings on race, gender and sexuality are manifest. Performances incorporate attempts at remembering, repeating, singing and shouting – sometimes accompanied by moving image work, props and/or collaborators.

Nina has made artworks and live performances which draw on the ‘unfinished business’ of 1980s social movements, particularly around gender and sexuality – e.g. the fight, in which she was involved, against the homophobic law Clause 28, and also the AIDS crisis and growing up as lesbian at that time. Sites of investigation have included historic all-women biker groups (Focal Point Gallery, Southend), humourless lesbians (Glasgow International), feminist protest (British Film Institute, Reading International) and recomposing civil engineering (Art on the Underground, Stevenage Council) and memories of Swiss civil defence (Stadtgalerie, Bern) so they are a bit queerer.

Starting points are often materials which she recalls from the 1980s, or borrowed from friends, or older feminist artists. She is intrigued by the pressure that being ‘faithful’ to all these personal and institutionalised materials puts on making artworks. 

She established the Artist Citizens Jury with artist Elizabeth Price.

Collaborators include King Frankie Sinatra (Karen Fisch), Fritha Jenkins, Katrin Barben, Publik Universal Frxnd, Anne Pollock.

Nina is currently working between Switzerland and the UK for the Swiss Pavilion of La Biennale Arte di Venezia, 2026

Her artistic research is partially supported through her employment at Goldsmiths School of Art.