Exhibitions Programme 2025-26

The Project Remains Incomplete: Jo Spence, Curated by Terry Dennett

22 May – 10 July 2026

Opening Reception: Thursday 21 May, 6 - 8pm
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This exhibition restages ‘art – photography – therapy’, an exhibition of Jo Spence’s photography curated by Terry Dennett in 2008, for an international photo therapy conference in Turku, Finland. Discovered in a battered portfolio in the Jo Spence Memorial Library Archive, the original exhibition’s 41 panels include some of the best known and impactful of Spence’s work, from the series Remodelling Photo History (1981-1982) and The Picture of Health? (1982-1986) to various photo therapy collaborations with Rosy Martin and others, ending with the Final Project she made while coming to terms with a terminal diagnosis.

Led by Patrizia Di Bello, Professor of History and Theory of Photography at Birkbeck, the curatorial team includes Talia Ulrich, Olga Murphy, Kerry Hart, Julian Ehsan, Farzad Fazilat, and Chloe Griffiths.

Melanie Smith: Tixinda, a Snail’s Purple

23 January - 20 March 2026

Humans’ relationships with the animal, plant, and mineral worlds are more often than not marked by the signs of extraction and extinction. Yet stories of co-existence and collaboration are multiple. Tixinda is the Mixtec word for sea snail Plicopurpura pansa, the only species of its kind whose ink can be harmlessly milked to produce a purple pigment, known as Tyrian or Royal purple. For centuries, this natural dye has sustained the livelihoods of Indigenous communities in the Pacific Coast of Mexico and Central America, who have themselves fought to protect the sea snail’s ecosystem from excessive tourism and fishery. This multi-media installation by British-Mexican artist Melanie Smith, developed in collaboration with visual artist Patricio Villarreal Ávila, dwells on the sensorial dimensions of a colour at once sacred and embedded in global systems of exchange, circulation, colonial erasure and survival.

Curated by Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra.

Ecologies of Violence

3 October – 5 December 2025

Across diverse landscapes, conflict-ridden regions often become ‘exclusion’ or ‘red zones’: geographically and ecologically devastated areas deemed too hazardous for human habitation. More than a century after the First World War, parts of Vimy Ridge on the old Western Front in France remain off limits to the public due to buried explosives, collapsing tunnels, and toxic residues. This now forested exclusion zone is a landscape shaped by human and more-than-human ecologies of violence. This exhibition featured Zone Rouge / Red Zone: Back Forest Reflections, a film-poem using infrared footage, reflective surfaces, and ambient sound to evoke the layered histories of destruction and renewal. Together with 3D scans of the forest, Ecologies of Violence offers a glimpse into an otherwise inaccessible heritage site where nature and conflict are deeply entangled.

This project presented research carried out as part of the UKRI FLF ‘Ecologies of Violence: Heritage And Conflict In More-Than-Human Worlds’, led by Dr Esther Breithoff and supported by Dr Matthew Leonard.