The Leeds 13 started working together in the early spring of 1998. They were 3rd year Fine Art students at the University of Leeds. Their collaboration began when the entire year group – 13 artists with very different individual practices – decided to work together on a single artwork. Their ambition was to devise a critical art practice that tested the protocols of academia and was antithetical to the highly commercialised and predominantly object-based YBA phenomenon that had grown out of Goldsmiths College. Their resulting projects were conceived collectively through a series of group discussions.