Zayd Menk is an interdisciplinary artist primarily working within sculpture and installation. Menk’s practice attempts to dissect technology as a hyperobject, the omnipresent force that defines our era, probing the vast and innumerable tangents that arise from our entanglement with technology.
At the core of his work is inquiry into human agency, infrastructure, intangible data, operations, and the obsessions and purposes of progress.
Using found objects as his primary material, Menk creates systems and structures that confront the paradoxes inherent in our relationships with technology, considering the possibilities and limitations of our agency in a world increasingly dominated by machines.
Where modern technology tends to become smaller and more sealed off, Menk's work deliberately regresses; salvaged components are used in ways they were never intended, a rebellion against the atrophying of agency and the gradual erosion of autonomy. This process of modifying found objects is visceral and central to his practice, a sense, as he describes it, of being inhaled or convected into something that wants to exist.
This process runs across Menk’s sculptural and installation practice, works that grow and mutate, sitting within a broader preoccupation with electronic waste as a material and residue of unfathomable operations. Borges's map parable, On Exactitude in Science, resonates strongly with his practice: progress producing ever-larger maps until future generations find them useless, a meditation on the potential self-defeating nature of accumulation. Ideas of obsolescence, extractivism, and the right to repair also run through the work, as do broader fascinations with the electromagnetic spectrum, the invisible infrastructures of frequency and signal that saturate contemporary life and remain largely imperceptible.
Menk is an alumnus of New Contemporaries (2023)
b. 2000, Harare, Zimbabwe
2019-2022, BA(Hons) Fine Art, University for the Creative Arts, Farnham
Recent Exhibitions
Solo:
2025 'operations CTRL', South Hill Park, Bracknell
2024/5 'mut[e]://tations', St. Chads Penton Rise, London
2024 'some stuff', Creatives Now, Bolton
2023 '[hyper</byte>]', Lion and Lamb, Farnham
2022 '[4.3><_-\›¬’°~⁰', Fine Liquids Art Gallery, London
Group:
2026 ‘Cardboard House', Palmer Gallery, London
2026 ‘The Bed Sitting Room', Lomex, New York
2025 ‘Chair I', Twilight Contemporary, London
2025 ‘trajectory’, hARTslane, London
2025 ‘Murmurs over the Glass Towers’, UG11, Waterloo Station, London
2025 ‘WHO WANTS FLOWERS WHEN THEY ARE DEAD?’, Williamson Art Gallery, Birkenhead
2025 ‘exe.hail’, Candid Arts Trust, London
2024 ‘Into the Flux’, LEX1, Peckham, London
2024 'C.L.O.N.E', Quingentole, Italy
2024 'Open Studios', FaMAS, Bolton
2024 'Manchester Open 2024', Home, Manchester
2024 'New Contemporaries', Camden Art Centre, London
2023 'New Contemporaries', Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool
2023 'Open Studios', FaMAS, Bolton
2023 ‘hyperobject::01’, University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth
2023 'Mapsion', Vuojoen Kartano, Eurajoki, Finland
2023 'Open Studios', FaMAS, Bolton
2022 'Platform Graduate Award 2022', Aspex Portsmouth, Portsmouth
2022 'Apophenia', Safehouse 2, London
2022 'Farnham Graduation Show', UCA, Farnham
2021 'Coming Up for Air', James Hockey Gallery, Farnham
2021 ‘<virtual-daze>’, Farnham Park, Farnham
2019 'Max Factor', The Bomb Factory Archway, London
Awards and Residencies
2024 Creatives Now, Residency
2023 New Contemporaries
2022 Platform Graduate Award, CVAN South East (nominated by Aspex Portsmouth)
2022 Surrey Sculpture Society Prize, Surrey Sculpture Society (runner up)