Daniel Ward (b. 1991) is an artist and writer. Working across film, photography and installation, his work explores themes such as commitment, failure and belonging, in relation to wider histories of politics and image-making. At the centre of his work is an examination of the effects and aftereffects of capitalism, Empire and consumerism, and how such forces organise everyday life.

His work often brings together political histories, personal anecdote and archival material, using them in different combinations and intensities. Through experimenting with different techniques and materials, his films often digress from their main subject associatively and poetically, allowing meaning in the work to become open-ended rather than strictly didactic. This form of filmmaking resembles the documentary in its use of documents and testimonies, yet images are juxtaposed and repeated, while sounds are digitally processed from field recordings and found samples.

Ward’s work also reflects on the way photographic and filmed images are constructed, and the uses to which such images are put. His artistic practice is informed by his extensive writing on art and film history, focusing mostly on histories of experimental, collective and political forms of art-making in the 20th century. His writing has been published in Artforum, Art Monthly, Texte zur Kunst and New Left Review: Sidecar, amongst others. He is currently a PhD candidate at University College London, writing on 20th century British art, politics and film, around 1982.

He is currently developing a trilogy of films—the first of which is Lonesome Ghosts (2025) first exhibited at Peer Gallery, London—exploring the relationship between memory, state violence and visual representation. The next film in this series, provisionally titled “Weapons”, is currently in production and takes its starting point as Operation Legacy—an official state policy, between 1950 and 1970, to destroy evidence concerning British colonial violence—and the origins of the documentary.