Tim Etchells is the Artistic Director of Forced Entertainment and one of the founding members of the company. Alongside his work with the group, Tim works independently as writer, director and artist on a variety of solo projects as well as on collaborations with other artists in different media. 

Tim’s work spans performance, video, photography, text and installation projects, and fiction. His first novel The Broken World was published in 2008 and his monograph on contemporary performance and Forced Entertainment, Certain Fragments is widely acclaimed. His recent performance projects include Sight is the Sense That Dying People Tend to Lose First with actor Jim Fletcher, in pieces with Rosas dancer Fumiyo Ikeda, Although We Fell Short with Kate McIntosh and That Night Follows Day, a piece performed by a cast of 14 children for adult audiences and made in collaboration with Flemish theatre company Campo.

In recent years Etchells has exhibited widely in the context of visual arts, with solo shows at Gasworks and Sketch (London), Künstlerhaus Bremen and Bunkier Sztuki, Krakow. His work has appeared in the biennales Manifesta 7 (2008) in Rovereto, Italy, Art Sheffield 2008, Goteborg Bienale (2009), October Salon Belgrade (2010), Aichi Trienale, Japan 2010. 1st Time Machine Biennale of Contemporary Art, Atomic shelter Konjic, Bosnia and Herzegovina (2011).

Selected groups shows include Family Matters: The Family in British Art at Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery (2011), touring to Museums Sheffield and Tate Britain, The Moon Is An Arrant Thief, David Roberts Art Foundation, London (2010), Play Admont, Regional 10, Austria (2010), In Full Bloom at Galleria Raffaella Cortesa in Milan (2010), Mein Essen Heidelberger Kunstverein (2010), Netherlands Media Art Institute (Amsterdam), MUHKA (Antwerp), Sparwasser HQ (Berlin), MACBA (Barcelona), The Centre for Book Arts, Canada and Exit Art (all New York) and Kunsthaus Graz. He co-curated and had new commissioned work in the Performing Sculpture section of the DLA Piper Series: This is Sculpture, at Tate Liverpool (2009). Etchells’s two permanent site specific public sculpture commissions for Weston-Super-Mare in the UK, opened in Autumn 2010 and he was nominated for the Northern Art Prize in 2011.  

He collaborates with performance maker and writer Matthew Goulish on the imaginary think-tank Institute of Failure and is currently Legacy: Thinker in Residence  at Tate Research and LADA in London. Tim is Professor of Performance at The University of Sheffield.

You can learn more about all of this work by visiting Tim’s website here as well as reading his regular online notebook – writings about his work and observations of things that he’s seen or done.