Rafał Zajko: The Spin Off
London-based a-n member Rafał Zajko’s first UK institutional solo exhibition features all-new work including a theatrical installation of sculpture, installation, ceramics and frescoes.
Making reference to folklore, pop culture and science fiction, these works reflect on the idea of ‘foreverism’ – a late-capitalist impulse to eternally refresh what’s familiar, through reviving trends, remixing songs, rebooting or creating spin offs.
Non-linear cycles are a recuring motif, reflected in the frescoes that appear throughout the exhibition. Meanwhile A Star Is Born is an automated sculpture that comes to life through light and smoke, functioning on a circular loop to explore the tussle between nostalgia and progress.
Until 7 June 2025, Focal Point Gallery, Southend fpg.org.uk
Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival
Films by a-n members are among the highlights of this festival’s programme of experimental film and artists’ moving image.
On Weaving by Glasgow-based artists Corin Sworn and Luke Fowler responds to the legacies of textile artists Bernat and Margaret Klein and their 1950s modernist home in the Scottish Borders, while creating a portrait of active textile production sites in Hawick and neighbouring towns. On Weaving also screens on 9 May at Barbican, London as part of Open City Documentary Festival.
London-based artist Maybelle Peters’ We Deh Here traces connections between Scotland and Guyana, through photographs, sewing, and research into the artist’s mother’s maiden name – Scotland – and the colonial narratives within it. Peters has directly stitched into the 16mm film, creating a moving image that constantly fluctuates in focus and clarity. By making film a material object, Peters challenges ideas of permanence, and the ways in which institutional archives can both document and erase histories, including Scotland’s role in the enslavement of African people.
1-4 May 2025, Alchemy Film Festival, venues across Hawick, Scottish Borders alchemyfilmandarts.org.uk
An Unbidden Quest
Artist Hannah Murgatroyd’s first solo exhibition in London features paintings shaped by memory, myth and motherhood.
Her dream-like works site women at their centres, as ‘heroic and weary’, shaped by history and by cycles of creation, loss and renewal. In these works the female body – as mother and child – is often fragmented but ‘unyielding’, and appears in landscapes inspired by Dartmoor, where the artist spent her childhood.
Murgatroyd explains that landscape’s influence: “Growing up there engendered in me the sensation time is a kaleidoscope, that we can be present and be thousands of years old. As I work, I think about this future cherished life, wanting to gift my child the armour of making with dreaming hands and eyes.”
7 May – 8 June 2025, The Florence Trust, London blackbirdrook.com
Od Arts Festival
This edition of the rural Somerset festival is curated by Artists Council member Livvy Penrose Punnett and features the work of several a-n members.
Plymouth-based artist Rachel Dobbs presents The West Coker Strop in collaboration with Vicky Putler, described as a new ‘community folk art object’ made from rope, while Chantel Powell’s The Summoning, a ceramic and iron sculpture of clustered hands, connects the act of harvesting to global economies and politics.
Meanwhile artist and festival founder Simon Lee Dicker presents the monumental sculpture Red Hot Haystacks. Made from cut grass and black light, the work explores ideas around the environmental impact of nuclear testing.
23-25 May 2025, East Coker and West Coker, Somerset odartsfestival.co.uk
We Feed the UK
This exhibition celebrates We Feed The UK, a storytelling project that pairs photographers and poets with inspiring food producers whose work offers positive solutions to climate change and biodiversity loss.
a-n member Arpita Shah worked with poet Zena Edwards and photographed two black-led female organisations in north London: Black Rootz and Go Grow With Love.
In our recent interview with Arpita, she explained: “They’re both multi-generational growing communities that empower black women to learn about land and growing your own food. It was a really inspiring experience spending time with these communities… a wonderful insight into women collectively growing, sharing and learning together, and the passing of ancestral knowledge to future generations.”
Until 22 June 2025, The Royal Photographic Society, Bristol rps.org
Sarah Casey: Negative Mass Balance
This new display by a-n member Sarah Casey explores the fragile state of glacial archaeology through delicate and atmospheric work inspired by objects emerging from ice in the Swiss Alps. Taking its title from the scientific term for receding glaciers, ‘Negative Mass Balance’ reflects on the melting of alpine ice, which has revealed ancient artefacts preserved for millennia. Such discoveries not only provide an insight into the past, but also highlight environmental change and the uncertain future this is resulting in.
Highlights of the show include Emergency! What Was Is, two large suspended drawings made from wax, paper, and glacial flour – the fine rock sediment left behind as glaciers retreat. Also on show are six prints of Casey’s heat-sensitive drawings placed in the landscape in the Swiss Alps, which capture views that are rapidly disappearing due to climate change. Rounding up the display is Casey’s highly impactful Ice Watch series – three miniature works on 5cm diameter glass watch faces, each painted with glacial flour collected in the Alps that depict landscapes that may never be seen again.
4 April – 22 June 2025, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds henry-moore.org
Ross Head: Soft Serve
Developed over the past year, a-n Artists Council member Ross Head’s latest body of work transforms Haricot Gallery into a space to reflect upon and explore the parallels of desire and hunger. Referencing Patti Smith’s 1978 song Because the Night – itself an ode to intense longing, connection and love – Head riffs on Smith’s urgent lyric, ‘love is a banquet on which we feed’.
Explaining his work, Head comments: “Through the exhibition, I invite visitors to consider the connections between bodily sensation and performance, alongside our own appetites for pleasure.” In addition to Head’s paintings, the show also includes an interview with curator Gemma Rolls-Bentley about the creative process behind his new body of work.
4 April – 3 May 2025, Haricot Gallery, London harricotgallery.com
Elsa James: It Should Not Be Forgotten
Renowned British African-Caribbean interdisciplinary artist and a-n member Elsa James presents her first major solo exhibition at Firstsite, featuring photography, neon, screen print and sound. The works confront Britain’s “national amnesia” regarding its role in the transatlantic trafficking of enslaved African people and the colonial legacies that followed, offering a deeply moving and immersive experience.
The show includes large-scale photographic pieces inspired by Christina Sharpe’s notion of how the slave ship marks and haunts contemporary Black life today. James explains: “The show explores the rupture, erasure, and fragmentation of histories that shape Black life in the diaspora, inviting moments of understanding, healing, and community connection.”
29 March – 6 July 2025, Firstsite, Colchester firstsite.uk
Dan Guthrie: Empty Alcove/Rotting Figure
Spike Island presents a new commission and solo exhibition by artist and a-n member Dan Guthrie. Working primarily with moving image, Guthrie’s practice explores representations and mis-representations of Black Britishness, with a particular interest in examining how these manifest in rural areas. His latest commission continues his ongoing exploration of the Blackboy Clock; an object of contested heritage publicly displayed in his hometown of Stroud, Gloucestershire.
The show features two newly commissioned videos that put forward the ‘radical un-conservation’ of the clock – a new theoretical concept proposed by Guthrie to describe the acquisition of an object with the express intent to destroy it. The results raise questions about what society chooses to memorialise and how we do so. A new online platform documenting the clock’s timeline, from its historical origins to current debates over its future, will launch at earf.info.
Until 11 May 2025, Spike Island, Bristol spikeisland.org.uk
Emma Critchley: Soundings
a-n member Emma Critchley’s solo exhibition takes us underwater, to explore the urgent and complex issue of deep sea mining. Combining filmmaking, choreography and public engagement, Critchley’s work highlights this looming ecological threat, prompting us to think about how we imagine and discuss the deep sea.
Soundings includes a three-screen film which considers the nuanced debates around commercial deep sea mining of minerals. The film moves between landscapes, soundscapes and voices, from an intimate encounter between a dancer and a deep sea creature to ancient stories about our innate connection to the oceans.
8 February – 3 May 2025, John Hansard Gallery, Southampton jhg.art
Vital Signs: another world is possible
A new commission by London-based a-n member Gayle Chong Kwan features in this exhibition, which brings together artists, designers and researchers to explore how the human health and that of the natural world are intimately connected.
I am the Thames and the Thames is me explores the historic, bodily and ecological connections between the River Thames and human waste. Chong Kwan’s sculptures, which include mythical creatures that she calls ‘river guardians’, are made of hand-dyed fabric, wood, reclaimed sewer pipes, chamber pots decorated with sewage ash slip and jewellery made from sewage aggregate. The fabrics are patterned with techniques such as tie-dyeing with bio-waste from London sewage, and the artist’s urine – an ingredient historically used in fabric dyeing.
Until 16 May 2025, Science Gallery London london.sciencegallery.com
Top image: Luke Fowler and Corin Sworn, On Weaving, film (still). Courtesy the artists and Alchemy Film & Arts
