A Look at the Year Ahead
UPCOMING EXHIBITION PROGRAMME
Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn
When Water Embraces Empty Space
24 January – 5 April 2025
A new film-based installation by Vietnamese American artist Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn, the artist’s first solo exhibition in London. Nugyễn’s practice explores how storytelling can promote healing, working with communities from different regions of the world that suffer from colonial trauma as a consequence of land and culture loss, wars and displacement.
When Water Embraces Empty Space focuses on the Luf Boat, from the island of Luf in Papua New Guinea. Taken from the island’s inhabitants following a genocidal attack and brought to Berlin by German traders in 1903, the Luf Boat now resides in the ethnological collection of the Humboldt Forum. With the loss of the last boat of its type and the craftsmanship preserved within it, the islanders also lost the knowledge of how to build these large vessels. Working with the descendants of the Luf Boat’s original builders: Stanley Inum, Fordy Stanley and Enoch Lun; Nguyễn seeks to fulfil their expressed wish to reconnect with the boat, and mourn their community’s loss, by proposing a novel approach to restitution and reparation enacted through knowledge-sharing.
Oceanic Visions /Te Moana Kite
April - June 2025
Premiering in London, we will present Hyena Lullaby (2020) by Artes Mundi 10 Prize winner Taloi Havini (born Bougainville, Nakas/Hakö people, based in Australia) and Michael Toisuta (Indonesian-Australian). The film, commissioned by TBA21–Academy with the support of Institut Kunst HGK FHNW in Basel, explores the underwater phenomenon of coral decline and self-regeneration through mass nocturnal spawnings, that the Nakas people call ‘Hyena’. Havini and Toisuta’s film is presented alongside Digital Ocean, an interactive digital project by the Mana Moana collective led by Rachael Rakena (Ngāi Tahu, Ngā Puhi, Ngāti Pākehā), Mike Bridgman (Tonga, Ngāti Pākeha) and Dr Karlo Mila (Tongan / Pākehā) encompassing a chorus of Pacific artists, poets and community leaders expressing the importance of preserving the Ocean’s well-being. The Pacific-centred season also includes a programme of historical and contemporary films by pioneering female filmmakers in the Pacific, drawing from Barry Barclay’s term ‘Fourth Cinema’, a classification in which he encompassed all means of Indigenous Cinema, made by Indigenous people, for Indigenous people.
Mikhail Karikis
Songs for the Storm to Come
June - August 2025
Forming Karikis’s latest work investigating climate change, its psychological impacts and the sonic memory of nature, Songs for the Storm to Come is a sound and video installation focusing on collective and individual responses to the impending transformations, while searching for ways to activate our trust in the possible and to imagine hopeful shared futures. The work engages with the urgency of climate change and proposes listening and communal sound-making as strategies to cultivate empathy, foster climate care and prepare us for what is to come. While voicing an acoustics of resistance, the work declares that change is in our hands. Continuing his practice of collaboration with communities, for this project Karikis worked with members of Manchester based SHE cooperative choir for women and non-binary people, and with sound researchers from the School of Digital Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University. The participants observe maps sourced from climate modelling data showing Britain’s transformed geography for 2050 as a result of rising sea levels. They reflect on the radical social and political changes required, and call for the power to bring us together to form communities in the face of these changes. The group imagine and articulate possible alternatives following the ‘deep listening’ workshop methods of queer composer Pauline Oliveros, guided by Karikis. They also reflect on the book Ideas to Postpone the End of the World by Brazilian indigenous leader and philosopher Ailton Krenak, and read extracts from the text The Universal Right to Breathe by Cameroonian political thinker, Achille Mbembe. During the course of the exhibition there will also be performative activations resulting from cross-generational dialogues with youth groups and adults.
Offsite – Long Distance Press
Tanner Lane Wall Rotational Public Art Commission
Summer 2025
This summer artists Adam Shield and Thomas Whittle (Long Distance Press) will present the second iteration of the Tanner Lane Wall Rotational Public Art Commission at Paddington Square. Created in collaboration with individuals through workshops at The Showroom, the project is indicative of our long-standing commitment to working with constituents and community groups in our local neighbourhood and beyond. Long Distance Press began in 2012 as a mail art project, quickly becoming a way for Shield and Whittle to produce collaborative publications. LDP now produces artists’ books, public commissions and exhibitions.
This annual cycle has been commissioned by Lacuna on behalf of Great Western Developments Ltd as part of the wider Paddington Square Public Art Programme.
The Showroom Annual Mural Commission 2025-26
Mandy El-Sayegh
September 2025 - August 2026
For The Showroom Mural Commission for 2025-26, London-based artist Mandy El-Sayegh will present a site-specific installation comprising visual and sound materials, exploring the circulation of language, codes and images. Mandy El-Sayegh’s practice is rooted in assemblage. Executed in a wide range of media — including densely layered paintings, sculpture, and installation, as well as performance, sound, and video — her works investigate the formation and break-down of systems of order, be they bodily, linguistic, or political.
Sojung Jun
September - December 2025
A newly commissioned film-based installation by Korean artist Sojung Jun, her first solo exhibition in a UK institution. The project represents a continuation of a series of films presented at MMCA (The Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea) in 2023, marking a significant development in Jun’s interest in time, speed, and mobility; tracing the journey of making music with performers who have travelled to distant places in search of sound. The project will be developed from encounters with Church Street Ward community groups.