JACK STRANGE, 24

Wide-eyed Jack Strange is the baby of the bunch, just a year out of art school, but his comical monster sculptures – a tree trunk with an evil face cut into it, for example – seem to have the art world hooked.

Unlike many friends who are still struggling, Strange was taken on by Moot gallery after graduating from the Slade, and soon spotted by Ryan Gander who asked him to take part in a group show in New York. Solo shows here and in America followed.

“It’s a bit extreme,” he says. “I have been lucky. I’m enjoying it, but I know it could go away as quickly as it has come. I’m not going to let the hype get to me.”

It is perhaps his clouded past that makes him so measured. He was often in trouble – by the age of 17 he was using drugs and “close to losing it”. But he got a place at college where the tutors inspired him to apply to art school. “Art certainly makes me happy now. I can make things, and some people like them, and it’s fulfilling.”

Strange is now in Brixton, busy making work for his second year at Zoo, represented by Limoncello gallery. “I don’t really get nervous. At the moment I’m making work and it’s fun.”

NINA BEIER AND MARIE LUND, 32

Now based in London, this Danish duo are becoming known for their disarming performance pieces.

Last year they planted someone in Tate Modern to start clapping until everyone in the gallery had joined in. Other projects include instructing gallery attendants to block visitors’ paths, and hiring a man to grow his hair for the duration of an exhibition. But they insist that their work is not meant to entertain. “It’s not about enjoying the performance – it’s about pushing the social situation,” explains Beier.

Both artists were brought up in revolutionary communities in Denmark. They met and began working together at the Royal College of Art in 2003 and are currently living separately in East London. In the past few months they have flitted between a residency in Tokyo, the Art Berlin Contemporary art fair, a trilogy of works at the ICA and a new show at Laura Bartlett gallery, with whom they come to Zoo.

They will be showing a joint project and a solo piece by Beier, in which Zoo’s 30 interns will whistle The Internationale while they work. “I hope that visitors hum the tune on their way home – they will have taken part in the work without even realising it.”

RUTH EWAN, 27

One of Zoo’s most anticipated newcomers, the Fife-born Ewan raised some eyebrows last year when she installed an aviary of 12 parrots in Edinburgh’s Embassy Gallery.

The work was an exploration of protest culture – Ewan trained the parrots to recite slogans from the G8 summit, with a couple eventually squawking “revolution!”

“I’m interested in the way that politics can be absorbed into popular culture, and how politics in history can translate into the present, or produce ripples of meaning,” she says.

Her work at Zoo, with Ancient and Modern gallery, is likely to include a political cartoon, a historical scene covered with an eight-year-old’s drawing, and a set of scrolls she made to be read by the town crier in Frome in Somerset.

Ewan comes from a family of artists and trained as a painter in Edinburgh, but found it very traditional (“If you made a video you were told it wasn’t art”) and later moved to East London with her boyfriend. In the past few years she has gained momentum, notably winning East, an open-submission competition selected by Jeremy Deller in 2006. She has just installed a show at the ICA, and will be taking part in the Tate Triennial in February.

But despite receiving plenty of offers for shows, Ewan still works in an office three days a week to pay her rent. “I’m busy and happy, but I just want to make my work. My goal is to leave my job next year.”

HARIS EPAMINONDA, 28

Currently based in Berlin, Epaminonda caught the art world’s eye last year when she represented Cyprus at the Venice Biennale. Her slickly edited films and haunting photos quickly picked up notice from the likes of Frieze magazine and Art Review.

Inspired by the soap operas and kitsch Greek romances she grew up watching, she often starts with retro film footage. She might then, say, heighten the colours, superimpose other images, change the speed or direction of the action, or add a melancholic score to a happy scene. She hopes to create a “merging of realities”, and, indeed, her films are dreamlike, but also dark – you can’t take your eyes off them for fear that you’ll miss the massacre that’s about to happen. Epaminonda also produces photos and collages, a selection of which will be shown at Zoo, by Rodeo gallery in Istanbul.

Having moved to the UK after finishing high school in 1997, and completed her training at the RCA, she is a bona fide Londoner. But, as glad as she is to return to the city, the rather shy Epaminonda finds herself quietly intimidated by the thousands who will attend Zoo over the four days. “I am nervous, as I always am, and it’s an important step given how many people will see my work. Art fairs are strange places. I must admit, I find myself not enjoying seeing work there myself, it’s too much in one go.”

Epaminonda claims, too, not to be interested in fame and fortune. “What comes comes, and if not I take things as they are. I’m lucky to survive on my work, and I just want to keep doing my work and live my life.”

NATHANIEL MELLORS, 33

He may be the eldest of our troupe, but the title of Mellors’s work at Zoo may not strike you as all that mature. Giantbum is a body of films, prints and sculptures based around a Monty Python-influenced script about medieval adventurers lost inside a giant’s body.

The script is an absurdist spiel of near-gibberish, stemming from Mellors’s interest in how we abuse language. “I’m interested in the culture of political spin – our sense of reality can be easily confused when the meaning of words becomes debased, such as the hijacking of the word ‘terror’ .”

At Zoo, Mellors will be represented by the ZINGERpresents gallery in Amsterdam and will exhibit a print and sculpture relating to the script. The full installation of Giantbum will be shown at the Tate Triennial in February.

Aged 18, Mellors was making techno and house records with friends, while working as a postman to save up for synthesizers. “Bands like Throbbing Gristle, Nurse With Wound and the Fall were my introduction to British art – bands that are both ‘music’ and ‘art’ at the same time.” He still plays in an art-rock band called Skill 7 Stamina 12.

He’s currently doing a residency in Amsterdam alongside his girlfriend, the Iranian artist Tala Madani, while planning solo shows in New York and Switzerland. Meanwhile, his recent video, The Time Surgeon, is making high-profile appearances in Europe, ending up at next year’s Venice Biennale.

“Yes, this is a good year,” he acknowledges happily. “Things really seem to be opening up.”

Zoo Art Fair, Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington Gardens, London W1 (www.zooartfair.com 0871 2301079), Oct 17–20 2008

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