AA student and AArchitecture editor, Leela Keshav, has been selected as the new writer-in-residence for Hauser & Wirth Somerset. Leela is the first participant of Write Now, a new writer’s residency in partnership with ArtReview.

Leela’s practice uses writing in conjunction with other media to speculate on the intersections between ecology, power structures and modes of resistance. During her time in Somerset, she will develop writing methodologies that engage with art and artists at Hauser & Wirth, the local community and the wider cultural and ecological landscape.

Over the course of the residency, Leela will document characters – both human and non-human – inhabiting and passing through Durslade Farm and its surroundings. Incorporating interviews, conversations, overheard words and observations, her writing process will weave together real and imagined voices that entangle past, present and future, complicating the linearity of time. Drawing from assemblage, utopian and feminist theories, she will explore writing that is plural. By critically engaging with the artists-in-residence, Leela aims to situate their work—and herself—within the multiplicities of the Hauser & Wirth Somerset’s ecology. Inspired by the work of Firelei Báez, she is interested in a writing practice that weaves anecdote with fact and archive with fabulation.

Image: Leela Keshav, 2024. © Leela Keshav. Photo: Hafsa Syed.