ICI London and University of the Arts, London present the first of two evenings of artists talks showcasing the research and artworks created during the University of the Arts London’s Fine Art Research Fellowships at the British School at Rome. The fellowship involved academic staff involved with practice-based fine art research spening time working in Rome, creating artworks, and researching more generally aspects of the culture and history of Italy.
Eva Sajovic presents the film Rise and Fall of a Temple. The film explores the ideological pillars of empire—tracing their origins in Ancient Rome and examining their enduring presence within contemporary power structures. The project asks what might emerge from their collapse—not with fear, but with hope of providing an opening for dialogue, imagination, and agency.
Juan Bolivar presents Intermediality in Roman Antiquity and Fresco Painting Through painting, film and drawing Juan Bolivar explores the intermedial qualities of Roman fresco painting and examines their material qualities and the facture, as well their social purposes – in connection to the depicted elements (such as food, music and performance).
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Juan Bolivar is a Venezuelan born British artist and Lecturer in Painting at Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London. Selected solo exhibitions include Home Alone, Lucy Mackintosh Gallery, Switzerland, 2008; Geometry Wars, John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, 2008; and On the Road Again, JGM Gallery, London, 2023. His work was selected for New British Painting, John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, 2004; East International, Norwich, 2007, and the inauguration of the new Nanjing Museum, 2015, where he was a prize winner.
Bolivar received the Pollock-Krasner Award (2000 and 2009), and his work is in national and international collections including the Government Art Collection. Residencies and exhibitions include Macro Asilo, Macro, Rome (2019), Bauhaus Museum, Dessau (2019), Bauhaus-Universität Weimar (2021), Artists Letters, C.A.P., Kobe, Japan (2025), BSR Research Fellow, Rome (2025), and The Pictures Within, 10 documents, Rome (2026).
Juan Bolivar’s practice brings together disparate contexts for viewing and interpretation of abstract painting. As a South American-born artist Bolivar is deeply influenced by Latin American Geometric Abstraction. Translocating to the UK in the 1980s heightened an awareness of this movement’s connections to Europe and North America. This enquiry has expanded to explore abstraction’s cross-cultural presence across new territories, from Dansaekhwa Korean painting to Roman frescoes, cinema, and popular culture. Recent paintings function as stages for contemplation to create a new magic realism and an exploration of painting’s social setting.
Eva Sajovic is a Slovene artist who lives and works in London, UK. She is a Senior Lecturer at Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London. Eva works across live art, installation, and social practice, with a focus on material and social transformation. Her work is influenced by her personal experience of Yugoslavia’s disintegration during my teenage years, followed by the fast transition from a socialist to a capitalist state. This formative experience drives her efforts to understand and navigate the neoliberal world she inhabits. Her practice often involves large-scale participatory projects, employing collaborative methods to inspire individuals to move beyond passive spectatorship and take active roles in fostering social change. She creates knitted, ceramic, and mixed-media objects that act as props, activators, or tools to support her interventions, and to help develop and refine her ideas during research.
Her work has been widely recognized and exhibited. In 2024 she was awarded Developing Your Creative Practice from the Arts Council England and a Fellowship in Fine Art at the British School at Rome (2024/25). Recent highlights include a major commission for the British Textile Biennial 2023. In 2022 she had a solo exhibition at 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning, London and in 2021 a retrospective solo exhibition at the Gallery Bozidar Jakac, Slovenia. In 2019 she presented All Rise For The Planet: 2030 Show Trial at Tate Modern. She was awarded a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council in 2019, for an international collaborative project Picturing Climate.
In 2026, she presents the solo exhibition Rise and Fall of a Temple at Chelsea Space, London (February–July 2026). Her work will be included in the group exhibition Musa at Casa Italia, Triennale Milano (February 2026), and she will have a solo exhibition at m2 gallery, London (April–June 2026).
