Saturday 25th January 2025
2-5pm 

Tickets to all our gallery socials are free, click to book tickets here

Gallery crawl route 
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Newport street gallery

Wes Lang 
The Black Paintings
27th September - 9th March 2025

Titled The Black Paintings, the exhibition features works produced between 2022 and 2024 that are populated by Lang’s distinctive group of characters, namely his favoured skeleton, but also animal-like and otherworldly beings. At times set against completely obscured, dark backgrounds, while at others lush landscapes, Lang’s compositions are story-like. 
While Lang’s paintings are dense with colour and imagery, his drawings are lighter, leaving broad and contemplative white spaces on the pages. Often, these works on paper include text, sometimes integrating phrases that echo Taoist philosophy, while other times using more personal expressions. Text and image frequently appear to be incongruous, encouraging viewers to engage further with the works and uncover meanings for themselves

 
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Sunday Painter

Georges Binda Celeste Alexandrino Gabriel Ferreira Da Silva
Letter to my son
18th January - 15th February 2025
 
In Ferreira Da Silva's deeply personal inaugural solo exhibition, Letter to my son, the Copenhagen-based artist weaves together film, sculpture, painting, and performance to examine family history, inheritance, and self-discovery through an autobiographical lens. The artist creates an immersive installation transforming commonplace, disposable materials such as cardboard, packaging tape, and thread into meticulously crafted replicas of domestic objects. Centered around a letter and personal effects left by his late father, the work explores the transmission of both physical and psychological inheritance across generations.


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Cabinet Gallery 

Gili Tal
The Cascades Plus
28th November - 25th January 2025 

The Cascades was an exhibition first shown in 2020-21 at Kunstverein Braunschweig eV. It consisted of a series of pictures, now here, of a repeated motif simulating rain and stock-image style graphics. Rendered in various shades of blue and stamped with a washed out Shutterstock watermark logo, the works evoke both windows looking out and street-view sights of newly constructed buildings, and the play of light, water and shadow on glass - an effect explicitly reproduced by the aluminium cladding styles of numerous contemporary facades.The modular double-wall application of these kinds of facades are valued for their propensity for improving a building’s weather resistance while achieving immediately recognisable and distinctly contemporary designs. As such, the pictures were hung last time in irregular chequerboard overlays of the gallery walls, creating a second skin indifferent to the architecture underneath. Suspended in mid-air over windows, entrances and exits, they appeared to float.Whether or not this anti-gravity conceit could be described as any kind of pure imagistic digital transcendence, this layering effect did recall a series of browser windows left open on a screen. In part this returned the work to the the digital space where it, like the buildings, were conceived, pertaining to the relationship between the supposed charismatic authority of digital renderings of new spaces or buildings and how we experience them on the ground.

 
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Studio Voltaire

Prem Sahib
Documents of a recent past 
15 January–23 March 2025

Documents of a recent past is a new exhibition by Prem Sahib (b. 1982, London) that brings together image, text, furniture and sound that centre around and depart from The Backstreet — London’s oldest and longest-running gay leather bar, which closed in 2022 after almost four decades.  
Sahib works primarily in sculpture, installation, performance, sound, video and photography. Sahib’s practice embodies a poetic and provocative “destabilised minimalism”, referencing the architecture of public and private queer spaces, structures that shape individual and communal identities, senses of belonging, alienation and confinement. 
Located in Mile End, East London, The Backstreet first opened in 1985 and was popular amongst the leather and fetish community. Following Sahib’s photographs of the gay saunas Chariots Shoreditch and Chariots Waterloo in 2016, the artist was prompted to document the interior of The Backstreet in 2017 due to rumours of its closure as the result of ongoing proposals for the development of the building. 
The images, taken by Sahib and photographer Mark Blower, were primarily conceived as a social record of the space, and are exhibited publicly for the first time in this exhibition. Extending their enquiries into interiority, marginal spaces and archival practices, Sahib will also present a new audiovisual work-in-progress, Footnotes for Heros. This work pairs text notations with an audio recording made at The Backstreet night, ‘Club Heros’, in 2015, alongside furniture from the venue.


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Omnibus Theatre 

Red Art Club
RAGE AGAINST THE DYING OF THE LIGHT
3rd January - 2nd February 2025

RAGE AGAINST THE DYING OF THE LIGHT showcases political art by 21 emerging and mid- career artists.  In formulating this exhibition we wanted to address the anxiety we collectively feel with the current brutal state of the modern world. In 2025, we look to a new age that we have no control over, we are faced with a depressive reality that has buried itself deep within our psyche. In cycles we watch as people die in genocide, we watch our climate die, we struggle against the cost of living crisis. We watch our right to protest die through actions like the Policing Bill, we realise we are the last people to have unrestricted freedom to protest. We grieve beauty destroyed by capitalist oppression, but continue tirelessly to create beauty in the world around us. When looking at the submissions that we received for this exhibition we noticed a narrative forming between the works. There are postcards to people in war (Seth Guy), trying to reach out to those affected and to understand what is happening to them. We see oppression and focus on the insidious nature of power, where we are constantly being monitored (Nikolas Wereszczyński) and we realise the rootlessness of our existence (Delnara El). We try to take action and file petitions which are then rejected (Amber Hill), we realise that our political leaders are blind (Mark Shepherd). 
We clench our fists, we change our language (Yu Zoe Cui). We recognise the devils in our society and we greet them by protest (Patrick Metcalfe, Izzy Hellam, Isabella Luciani). As a result of protest, power bites back, we cry and we watch as people die (EK Myerson, Jo Warren, Simon Elliott). We imagine a world where world leaders are made to suffer like us (Emilia Bryant). We watch as our climate dies (Simon Elliott, Gen Doy) and we imagine what the apocalypse would look like if it ever were to happen (Moises Moreno). We wonder if the apocalypse were to happen, who would be rich enough to survive, who would make it onto the life raft at the end of the world and what would that look like (Mark Shepherd). The exhibition ends with a poem, a shout into the void, a plea for a better world (Nafeesa Naz Zaman). We cry out and we try to make a difference in the world. We seek to create beauty in the hope for a better future, we rage against the dying of the light.