Peer was 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) explored 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 explored 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.
Lonesome Ghosts is 52 minutes long and screenings at Peer began on the hour from 12pm, with the last screening at 5pm.
Lonesome Ghosts was part of Peer’s 2025 Programme, which addressed 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.
Talks, Events and Workshops:
Artist Talk: Daniel Ward and Richard Birkett
9 October 2025, 7–9pm
Artist, writer and filmmaker Daniel Ward, and curator and writer Richard Birkett, discuss Ward’s new exhibition and wider practice.
T.J. Clark on art, politics and realism
29 October 2025, 7–9pm
Art historian T.J. Clark and artist, writer and filmmaker Daniel Ward discuss Ward’s exhibition Lonesome Ghosts, and reflect on the role of realism in art and politics.
Caitlín Doherty responds to Lonesome Ghosts
6 December 2025, 3–5pm
Writer Caitlín Doherty shares a response to Daniel Ward’s exhibition.
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: Sidecar, 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.
Supporters:
Peer’s 2025-26 Programme is supported by the Paul and Louise Cooke Endowment. With thanks to the Daniel Ward Exhibition Supporters Circle.
Press:
e-flux London Roundup
