Radical Ecology and Borneo Bengkel are delighted to announce Time of the Rivers, an artist Fellowship programme commissioned by the British Council.
Running from March to September 2025 the Fellowship is part of Human-Nature, the British Council’s 3-year programme in Malaysia exploring the role of the arts and creative approaches to highlight climate adaptation.
The Fellowship engages four artists, from Malaysia and the UK, to explore climate adaptation, decolonial approaches to art and ecology, and socio-political impacts on displaced communities.
Programme Overview
The Fellowship builds on ongoing research and community engagement by Radical Ecology and Borneo Bengkel, focusing on the ecological and social impacts of major dam projects such as Bengoh (Sarawak, 2010s) and Burrator (Dartmoor, 1890s). It centres the lives of displaced communities and historic legacies of dispossession, questioning how the extractive dynamics of economic development are also reflected in dominant approaches to heritage and culture that continue to connect the UK and Borneo to this day. In response to these issues and the projected impacts of global warming, the project also considers the reparative and emancipatory potential of artistic strategies that reconnect us with the time and flow of our river ecologies.
Programme Components
Online Mentoring Sessions (April-May): to deepen decolonial approaches to art and ecology.
Field Visits (June-July): two immersive 2-week field visits in Borneo and the UK.
Online Showcase (September): present research findings and proposals for new works that will emerge through the 6-month programme.
Meet the Fellows
Kedisha Coakley is a Sheffield-based artist of Caribbean descent. Her practice spans sculpture, printmaking, and photography, predominantly casting in bronze and printing with braided hair, through which she interrogates Black histories and experiences. Investigating the overlooked, she remixes aesthetics, techniques, and cultural references throughout her work.
Recent exhibitions, commissions and artist programmes include Contemporary Sculptor for Ronald Moody: Sculptural Life exhibition at The Hepworth Wakefield UK. Dutch Flower Paintings: Exploring Art in Bloom, commission for Millennium Gallery Sheffield UK. Dig Where You Stand Commission, Sheffield UK. Betwixt, Beyond exhibition at Fitzrovia Chapel, London UK. Freelands Foundation Platform 22 programme, UK. Against Apartheid exhibition at Karst Gallery, Plymouth, UK. Super Natural exhibition at Eden Project, Cornwall. Mbulu Ngulu, 2022. Steel sculpture, Eden Project, Cornwall, UK. New Contemporaries 2022 and Kedisha Coakley, solo exhibition at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield, UK.
kedishacoakley.co.uk
Rizo Leong is a Malaysian woodcut printmaking artist and social activist from Ranau, Sabah, known for his commitment to empowering communities through art. He is a co-founder of
Pangrok Sulap, a collective that combines traditional woodcut printing with activism to address social and environmental issues. Through his work, Rizo uses art as advocacy to highlight themes such as indigenous rights, deforestation, and education. His projects often involve direct collaboration with local communities, allowing them to express their stories through art. He has conducted workshops in rural areas, teaching woodcut printing as a tool for self-expression and cultural preservation. Rizo believes that art is not just about aesthetics but a means of fostering unity, awareness, and change. His works have been exhibited internationally, gaining recognition for their raw, powerful messages. His dedication to both creativity and activism makes him a key figure in Malaysia’s contemporary art scene.
Syarifah Nadhirah, an architect and visual artist, is the Creative Director at Forest House, overseeing the Forest Learning Centre at KL’s Perdana Botanical Gardens. This community space invites the public to engage with Malaysia’s ecological heritage and conservation efforts across forest, marine, and wildlife sectors.
She self-published a book, Recalling Forgotten Tastes, which documents edible and non-edible plants through the perspectives of the members of the Semai and Temuan Orang Asli communities in Peninsular Malaysia. Her solo exhibition, Measure of Seeds, examines movement of species in colonial plantations. Through printmaking and archival art, Syarifah explores the relationships between botanical landscapes, seed guardianship, and food security.
She has attended notable residencies, including Rimbun Dahan Southeast Asian Arts Residency and the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh’s Plants on Paper Residency. She has also been invited to speak at international panels, including the National University of Singapore and Bangkok Literature Festival.
syarifahnadhirah.com
Ben Swaby Selig. At the heart of Ben Swaby Selig’s practice lies an intersection between materiality, nature and technology. Operating across sound, curation and installation, his practice presents the archive as a living, reactive entity shaped by those who build it. Rooted in London at V&A East, Ben’s curatorial practice centres local stories often obscured by institutional frameworks in the retelling of object histories. Underpinned by a background in engineering, his practice is attuned to modes of Black sonic, social and spatial production – exploring ways in which communities subvert technologies symbolic of surveillance and state control to create new forms of sonic resistance. Ben’s research has examined how Jamaican engineers repurposed technologies of British imperial trade to build sound systems and sonic effect units, mobilising local communities and reshaping their connections to land and water. Together, these strands of research shape a practice that is attentive to the invisible, often inaudible relationships between landscape, technology and time.
www.benswabyselig.com
Meet the Mentors
Celine Lim, an Indigenous Kayan from Sarawak, Malaysia, is the Managing Director of SAVE Rivers, a grassroots organisation advocating for Indigenous rights and environmental protection. Through community mapping, agroforestry and more, SAVE Rivers empowers local indigenous communities in climate solutions. Celine’s work addresses deforestation, sustainability, and social inequalities, earning her recognition in sustainability leadership and women-led impact.
Emma Nicolson is Head of Visual Arts at Creative Scotland. She is known for her innovative approach to art, nature, and community engagement, having spearheaded transformative projects at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE) and founded the award-winning ATLAS Arts on the Isle of Skye. Emma was part of the 2024 Human Nature delegation to Malaysia funded by the British Council.
June Rubis is an Indigenous scholar, decolonial thinker and conservationist from Sarawak, Malaysia with over 20 years of experience in biodiversity conservation, climate change, and Indigenous knowledge systems.
She is the Global Council Co-Chair of Documenting Territories for the ICCA (Indigenous and Community Conserved Areas) Consortium, and co-founded Building Initiatives in Indigenous Heritage (BiiH) to support the revitalisation of rituals and cultural protocols in her homeland and beyond.
Françoise Vergès is currently a Senior Research Fellow at UCL’s Sarah Parker remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation and Bennister Fletcher Foundation Fellow for 2025 for “Imagining The Post-Museum”. Her recent publications include Making the World Clean: Wasted Lives, Wasted Environment and Racial Environment (Goldsmiths Press, 2024), A Programme of Absolute Disorder (Pluto Press, 2024) and A Decolonising Feminism (Pluto Press, 2024).
Meet the Team
Borneo Bengkel and Radical Ecology are collaborating together for this exciting programme, commissioned by British Council Malaysia.
Borneo Bengkel is a platform founded in 2017 with the aim to unite creatives from throughout the regions of Borneo: namely Sabah and Sarawak (Malaysia), Kalimantan (Indonesia), and Brunei. Through their activities they explore identity, culture and creative expression through the eyes of artists, filmmakers, social activists, researchers and cultural practitioners. As an island divided into three nations, Borneo Bengkel felt disconnected from their fellow Borneans. Over the past four years they have hosted creative residencies, workshops, exhibitions, and talks for collaborators from Borneo, Peninsular Malaysia, and beyond.
Radical Ecology works across art, research, and policy to advance environmental justice. They collaborate with leading artists, climate scientists, policy-makers, grassroots activists, cultural institutions and research centres to deliver critical interventions and public art projects, nurturing imagination where it is most needed and building community for change. Radical Ecology operates at different scales and in diverse contexts, to create opportunity, community and relationship to the landscape and to nurture “planetary imagination” – a creative force and form of transformative agency that can translate across silos of racial identity and into the heart of our political ecology.