Bio / contact
Hester is an artist-researcher based in London and Beijing. Her hybrid practice explores histories at the margins of visibility and audibility, working across sound, moving image, and archival interventions.
Drawing on speculative and collaborative approaches, her work attends to histories shaped by displacement, racialised labour, and migration. Recent projects focus on port cities and their colonial entanglements, examining diasporic formations through a long-term research enquiry anchored in Liverpool.
As co-founder of Sine Screen, an independnet moving image collective that seeks to open up space for critical dialogue around East & Southeast Asia in the UK, she has curated programmes with Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), Barbican, LUX, esea contemporary, among other spaces.
She is the founder of Unruly Ear collective, an research and curatorial initiative exploring sound and alternative listening practices.
Selected exhibitions / awards
2025
Where the Sea Reaches [group exhibition], He Xiangning Art Museum, Shenzhen
Archive Fever [group exhibition], Accent Sisters, New York
Erinnerungen an Heute [screening], Gemeinde Koln, Cologne
Voicing the Archive [group exhibition], esea contemporary, Manchester
2024
Ghost Dance 幽灵舞 [group exhibition], Jimei x Arles Photography Festival, Xiamen
All Our Stories: Migration and the Making of Britain [group exhibition], Migration Museum, London
Screening Rights Festival [screening], MAC Birmingham
From (Counter-)Archives to Activation [exhibition], esea contemporary, Manchester
Seeing Double, part of Foreign Bodies [exhibition], Exeter
Three Shadows Photography Award 三影堂摄影奖 [group exhibition], Beijing
New Contemporaries [group exhibition], Camden Arts Centre, London
2023
New Contemporaries [group exhibition], Grundy Gallery, Blackpool
OUTPUT Gallery Photography Open [group exhibition], The Bridewell Studios, Liverpool
Lucky Number 8 [group exhibition], The Bomb Factory, London
2022
Current Obsessions, MA Photojournalism and Documentary Photography graduate show, University of the Arts London, 2022
BBC New Creatives showcase [group exhibition], ICA, 2022