Daniel Ward: Lonesome Ghosts

20 Sep-13 Dec 2025

PV 19 Sep 2025, 6-8pm

Overview

Peer is excited 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 collective practices and histories of image making in relation to political action and co-option.

Centered around a new long-format film of the same title, Lonesome Ghosts (2025) explores the ramifications of undercover policing in the UK. Organised into four chapters, the film focuses on the history and role of undercover policing in British life. Moving between filmed and found footage, evidence and personal testimony, the work 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. 

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, the film 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.

Lonesome Ghost is part of Peer’s 2025 Programme, which addresses themes of inheritance, memory, health and home, all under the shadow of the rise of authoritarianism, and has included solo exhibitions by artists Mohammed Z. Rahman and Alexis Kyle Mitchell. Ward’s exhibition is accompanied by a series of events as part of Peer’s Talks, Events and Workshops programme.

Biography:

Daniel Ward (Coventry, 1991) lives and works in Oxford. His work has been shown at HKW, Berlin, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, and the Museum for Photography, Berlin, amongst others. He was the inaugural recipient of the Michael O’Pray Prize in 2018, an award for new writing on moving-image art supported by Art Monthly and Film and Video Umbrella. He was commissioned by City Projects to write The Politics of Production, a report examining the conditions for producing experimental film in the UK, funded by Arts Council England and published in 2019. His writing has been published in Artforum, Art Monthly, Texte zur Kunst and New Left Review, amongst others. He is currently a PhD candidate at University College London, writing on 20th century British art, politics and film from 1982 to 1997.