Enter09- the annual showcase of the year’s finest work by South Asian New media graduates kicked off the fifth year at the Watermans New Media Gallery, providing a platform to highlight emerging talent from the field of digital and new media production. This year’s exhibition comprises a range of works including photography, film, animation, interactive work as well as graphic and communication design. A total of eight artists were selected on their ability to utilize new technologies and apply them to creative practice in order to articulate their responses to contemporary issues in an innovative manner.

Artists featured in enter09 are as follows:

• Hamja Ahsan, an MA from Chelsea College of Art & Design, presents Redo Pakistan, a staged press symposium and newspaper stall, bringing together social visionaries from across the world to re-imagine the nation.
  
  
• Niharika Hariharan, MA from Central Saint Martins creates an interactive online platform, Wandering Geographies that eschew conventional intelligent tools and maps for “intuitive navigation” in order to create and share way finding methods not guided by such navigational tools.
  
  
• Hicham Harrak, a BA from Chelsea College of Art & Design, displays a range of photographs, Who is advertising? looking at the images in magazines and the reality of their affects on consumers.
  
  
• Joshua Howland-Roohi, a Graphic Design and New media graduate from Epson, presents a short animation film, In the Shadow of War, based around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
  
  
• Ayesha Moarif, an MA from Goldsmiths, has an interactive installation, Burn After Reading, made up of hand written confessions from gumttree.com Viewers are invited to use a lighter to “illuminate” each confession and then “burn it”.
  
  
• Nina Mangalanayagam, MA Photography from Royal College of Art, of mixed Swedish and Tamil heritage, offers a video performance, Lacuna, where she is attempting to do the Indian ‘head nod’!
  
  
• Samra Saleem, another MA from Chelsea, whose interest includes print and photography, and hails from the Maldives, reflects on her own homeland in, Are there People Living in the Maldives? that juxtaposes the tourist brand imagery alongside the reality.
  
  
• Maithili Pradhan, BA from Central Saint Martins, is a co-curator of the project, along with Ilze Black the New Media Programmer at Watermans. She is also currently pursuing an MA at Sotheby’s Institute, London.

Watermans celebrates its 25th anniversary this year, and is proud to host enter09, providing a much needed platform for emerging talent. The exhibition is free to the public and continues until 1st December 2009.