JAMES JOHNSON-PERKINS
ABOUT
GIGATAGE
PLAXIS
INTERMADES
VIDEOSTAGIA
BIO/archive
SHOP
James Johnson-Perkins is a British award-winning artist whose interdisciplinary practice traverses contemporary art, digital culture, and social engagement, incorporating NASA-derived imaging, Archive Collections and AI processes. Shaped by an itinerant life across India, Turkey, the United States, Slovakia, Italy, Nepal, Russia, Oman, China, and the UK, his work carries a borderless sensibility attuned to the tensions and continuities of global culture. He has exhibited widely across Europe, Asia, and the Americas, including presentations at Ars Electronica in Linz and twice at the Venice Biennale. His recent inclusion in Jaipur Arts Week (2026) signals the continued expansion of his international presence.
His exhibition history spans experimental and institutional contexts, including The GenAI Summit at ArtX Gallery and The Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, Post Digital Reality at the Video Art International Festival in Linz and Nord Art in Budelsdorf. Other exhibition venues include The Emily Harvey Foundation (Venice), The Royal College of Art (London), The Centre for Contemporary Art (Glasgow), The Chinese European Art Centre (Xiamen), The Museum of Modern Art (Toyota), Czong Institute for Contemporary Art (Seoul), The Patan Museum (Kathmandu), The Museum of Digital Art (Austin) and The Arts Students League (New York).
Johnson-Perkins has developed ambitious participatory projects. In Jaipur, a 400-square-metre light box immersed viewers within a Gigatage work, collapsing the boundary between image and spectator. Elsewhere, he has led large-scale robotics events in Poole and West Bromwich, Giant Play and Lego exhibitions across the UK, and collaborations with the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art and other international projects have included Giant Twister events in China and at the Free Arts Festival in Taiwan.
4 distinct ways of working
Johnson-Perkins has 4 different strands of work:
At its core, his practice is a meditation on memory, nostalgia, and play, mobilised to address themes of ethics, religion, the uncanny, migration, capitalism, politics, and war. Through digital collage, childhood artefacts, nostalgic ephemera, costume, new media, and drawing, he constructs layered taxonomies of narrative that interrogate history, identity, and place.
GIGATAGE (Gigapan/Montage)
forms the most expansive strand: vast digital panoramas in which historical and contemporary figures converge within globally recognisable sites. Structured by themes of belief, conflict, and refuge, these works operate as immersive visual archives, referencing figures such as Canaletto, Bosch, and Schopenhauer while combining panoramic scale with intense detail.
PLAXIS (Play/Praxis)
turns to childhood materials—Lego, toys, and 1980s cultural references—reframing play as a critical method through which memory and cultural meaning are examined.
INTERMADES (Interactive/Readymades)
extends this into participation, using “artscores” to activate games and objects, inviting collaborative engagement and open-ended interpretation.
VIDEOSTALGIA (Video/Nostalgia)
combines location, performance, and retro digital aesthetics to rework culturally familiar media into layered, multi-sensory reflections on memory and time.
Together, these strands articulate a practice that is immersive and reflective, assembling fragments of culture and experience into complex systems that continually question how narratives are formed and understood.
RECENT INTERVIEWS
Jaipur Arts Week 5, Jan 2026
Florence Contemporary Gallery, Interview 2026
Visual Arts Journal 2024
TITLE IMAGE (TOP): Paris Kisses, After Süskind and Webb, 7.4m x 2m, 2025