East, London
Daniel Ward
Lonesome Ghosts
PeerPeer is pleased to present Lonesome Ghosts, the first solo exhibition by Oxford-based artist, writer and filmmaker, Daniel Ward. Working with text, installation, film and video, Ward’s work explores the relationship between the collective practices and histories of image making in relation to political action and co-option. Centered around a new long-format, single screen film of the same title, Lonesome Ghosts (2025) explores the ramifications of undercover policing in the UK. Organised into four chapters, the work moves between filmed and found footage, official police documents, evidence and personal testimony, and offers an examination of the complex affinities between personal commitment, state violence and visual culture. Each chapter centres a different voice or material: a meeting with an exhausted and lonely political organiser; silent footage of a funeral filmed by an undercover policing unit in 1979; an interview with a photographer who discovered he was the target of police surveillance; and a filmmaker grappling with the dreams and failures of collective filmmaking. Threaded throughout the work is a mutual consideration of politics and visual depiction. Ward focuses on the camera as a central device and, in turn, the purpose of both documents and documentary, as well as collective and group work. Produced by Ward over a three year period using an iPhone and an inexpensive digital camera, the footage and its treatment is, at times, intentionally out of focus or underexposed: subjects are kept slightly out of shot, or at the edge of the frame, encased in shadows. Ward’s use of sound, from undefined field recordings to abstract audio samples, further emphasise the work's interest in representation and depiction, contributing to the film's underlying atmosphere of paranoia and fear. Throughout the gallery and its external windows Ward has used samples from a redacted ‘Tradecraft Manual’, a guidance dossier released by the Undercover Policing Inquiry in 2018, that outlines the Special Demonstration Squad’s methods to conduct undercover work. These techniques are echoed in the testimonies of those heard on screen, where these same methods were experienced first-hand. Lonesome Ghosts explores the idea that undercover policing and state surveillance is not a self-contained drama of isolation and paranoia affecting a handful of individuals. Instead, this exhibition takes this minor history as an opening to think through larger histories of commitment, filmmaking, failure, belonging and intimacy – and the opposing political ends to which these are employed.