Underwater Complications: Aquatheatre production of Much Ado About Nothing postponed

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Underwater Complications: Aquatheatre production of Much Ado About Nothing postponed

It is with waterlogged regret that we must announce the postponement of our ambitious new production of Much Ado About Nothing (Underwater), originally scheduled to open this spring at the Penguin Pool, London Zoo.

Rehearsals of this aquatheatre masterpiece have revealed a number of unforeseen challenges. Chief among them: the cast’s ongoing struggle to breathe, project, and deliver Elizabethan verse whilst submerged in several thousand gallons of water. Despite weeks of training with scuba instructors, voice coaches, and a former Royal Navy diver, the actors are reporting persistent difficulties with “lines coming out as garbled burbles.”

Moreover, the penguins,intended as silent, elegant witnesses to the comedy of miscommunication,have taken a more active role than anticipated. Their frequent incursions into scenes have resulted in lost costumes, dropped regulators, and in one case, an unplanned underwater duel between Benedick and a particularly territorial Humboldt penguin.

Our costume department has also raised concerns: doublets and gowns, even when waterproofed, have proven distressingly prone to ballooning. One dress engulfed two actors entirely, necessitating an emergency surfacing and a stern note from the zoo’s safety officer.

Finally, the acoustics of the pool have proved hostile to wit. Lines that should sparkle with Shakespearean banter currently resemble “a plumbing mishap with minor comic overtones.”

For these reasons, the opening has been postponed until later in the year, giving the company time to:

• Develop a new underwater speech technique somewhere between scuba signalling and semaphore.

• Negotiate a cohabitation agreement with the penguins.

• Reconsider whether Beatrice can plausibly duel in flippers.

• Reassess our insurance premiums.

We are determined to bring this unique production to life (and keep everyone alive in the process), but for now, the show must not go on. Tickets already purchased will be valid for the rescheduled dates, or patrons may request a refund if they feel they cannot, in good conscience, support what one actor has described as “Shakespearean waterboarding with costumes.”

We thank our audiences for their patience, and promise: when Much Ado About Nothing (Underwater) finally opens, it will be a theatrical experience like no other.

Pimlico Wilde Productions

Yachtism: The New Wave of Floating Art

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Yachtism: The New Wave of Floating Art

Is the next great artistic movement being launched not from a gallery in Berlin or a warehouse in Hackney, but from the sundeck of a 60-metre motor yacht? Increasingly, collectors and curators are whispering about “Yachtism” , an emerging tendency among artists who choose to live and work not in garrets, but on luxury yachts, most often moored in the Mediterranean and, for reasons of tax and nostalgia, occasionally in Jersey.

A Movement at Sea

At its heart, Yachtism is less about a unified visual style than a shared context: the artists all create their work on the water, often aboard vessels loaned , or temporarily endowed , by collectors. Their studios are repurposed sky lounges, their canvases stretched across polished teak tables, their inspirations drawn as much from shifting light on the Côte d’Azur as from the ever-present hum of generators below deck.

The results, some argue, are extraordinary.

Artists Afloat

“I paint differently on board,” says Marina Voss, a German conceptual painter currently based on La Sirena, a 45m Feadship anchored in Antibes. “The sea is always moving beneath you. Nothing is stable. That uncertainty enters the work. On land, I made static abstractions. At sea, the brush refuses to settle , it sways.”

Not all agree. London portraitist Doodle Pip, who briefly attempted a residency aboard Golden Osprey in Dartmouth, abandoned the project within days.

“Artists need struggle,” he insists. “The soft hum of an engine room is not struggle. A steward offering you burrata at three in the morning is not struggle. You can’t make raw work when you’re being asked whether you prefer the tender launched at 10 or 11. Plus I get seasick crossing the Thames, so Yachtism is not for me.”

Collectors as Patrons

For collectors, however, Yachtism represents a renaissance of the Renaissance model , patrons providing not only the means but also the stage for creation.

“I don’t see it as indulgence,” says hedge fund manager and collector Clive Mortimer, owner of the 58m Elysium Ho. “I provide artists the freedom to explore ideas without rent or distraction. Besides, a yacht is a floating gallery. Guests step aboard, and the work is there , fresh, salt-sprayed, immediate.”

Mortimer has recently acquired three canvases created on board his yacht, noting, “They smell faintly of diesel and sea air. That’s provenance you can’t fake.”

The Works Themselves

Critics are divided on whether Yachtist works surpass those produced by landlubber predecessors. Some praise their “fluid dynamism” and “maritime palette.” Others dismiss them as “well-funded plein air.”

Yet auction houses report rising interest. A recent Hazelton sale included Wake Study No. 3, painted off Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, which fetched £1,220,000 , triple the artist’s previous land-based record.

An Art Movement or a Passing Tide?

Will Yachtism endure? The history of art is littered with fleeting -isms. Yet its confluence of wealth, patronage and a genuine shift in working environment suggests more than a passing wave.

Whether moored in Port Hercule, drifting off Porto Cervo, or tied up discreetly in Dartmouth’s yacht haven, Yachtism insists on one simple proposition: that art, like its makers, sometimes works best when allowed to drift.

Strange Materials, Stranger Intentions: The Year in Unusual Media

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Strange Materials, Stranger Intentions: The Year in Unusual Media

by Wilhelmina Anchovie

It is a rare art critic who can look at a sculpture made of condensed milk, nod sagely, and remark, “Yes, of course.” Yet that is increasingly the job description. This year, artists have outdone themselves in their pursuit of media that resist permanence, practicality, and sometimes common sense. The only constant is the confidence with which they insist these substances are the future of fine art.

Anaïs Joubert’s Fermenting Palettes

Parisian painter Anaïs Joubert has abandoned pigment altogether, working instead with oxidized honey layered across paper. The results are sticky, shimmering abstractions that continue to darken and mould in real time. Critics have praised the works for their commentary on “the perishability of beauty.” Gallery staff reportedly wear gloves and carry fly traps during installation.

Marco Ellini and the Magnetized Flock

Milan’s Marco Ellini has created an installation of suspended ball bearings held aloft by electromagnets. The spheres shift and clatter as viewers pass, producing what the artist calls “a choreography of anxious atoms.” The piece is visually elegant but blew several circuit breakers mid-opening, which Ellini cleverly recast as “a meditation on collapse.”

Tasha Rudd: The Bureaucratic Sublime

Londoner Tasha Rudd shreds government documents, pulps them into a slurry, and paints with the resulting paste. Her recent series, HMRC in Monsoon, features brooding washes of grey and ochre derived from obsolete tax forms. Rudd insists it’s about the opacity of institutions; critics suspect it’s also about not paying for art supplies.

Jinwoo Park’s Meteorological Stains

In Seoul, Jinwoo Park has been exhibiting canvases stained only with rainwater collected from disparate neighborhoods. From industrial zones come inky, soot-drenched blotches; from suburban gardens, pale mineral veils. His diptych Exhaust and Incense, contrasting rain near an oil refinery with that from a Buddhist monastery, was described by one visitor as “a weather report for the soul.”

Carla Menotti’s Rotten Still Lifes

Buenos Aires performance artist Carla Menotti produced Ephemeral Orchard, a gallery filled with arrangements of fresh fruit that aren’t replaced daily as they decay. Mould, collapse, and fruit flies are central to the piece. Menotti describes it as “Vanitas in real time.” One collector reportedly bought a week’s worth of rotting pears, only to be politely told there was nothing left to ship.

Elias Quade’s Breath of the Public

Brooklyn-based Elias Quade has made oxidation his muse. He frames polished copper sheets and invites viewers to breathe on them, leaving foggy halos and long-term patinas. The pieces accumulate stains of intimacy, disgust, and garlic bread. Quade describes this as “the audience immortalized in atmosphere.” His dealer calls it “interactive rust.”

The lesson from this year’s eccentricities is simple: art is no longer confined to canvas, clay, or stone. It will corrode, curdle, ferment, and buzz until it finds a medium stranger than the world it reflects. And when the critics finally nod and murmur “Of course,” what they really mean is, “Please let this not stain my jacket.”

Toward an Ethics of Perambulation: My Necessary Turn to Climate Art

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Toward an Ethics of Perambulation: My Necessary Turn to Climate Art

by Dafydda ap Gruffydd

It has become increasingly apparent to me,indeed, unavoidable,that my practice could no longer remain merely responsive to landscape. To walk, to traverse, to efface one’s own trace is no longer sufficient in an epoch defined by ecological precarity and moral inertia. The time demanded not only motion, but position. And so, after a period of profound contemplation (much of it ambulatory), I have chosen to pivot my practice toward what I term Climate Art.

This was not a decision taken lightly. Nor was it inevitable, only necessary, for an artist whose work has always existed in a state of ethical alignment with the land. My earlier walking works, often misunderstood as exercises in endurance or minimalism, were in fact proto-ecological interventions: durational acts of refusal, rejecting extraction, spectacle, and permanence. That others failed to recognise this is not surprising; recognition often lags behind responsibility.

Climate Art, as I understand and practise it, is not illustrative. It does not depict catastrophe, nor does it indulge in the emotive excesses of melting icebergs or anthropomorphised polar fauna. Such gestures, while well-meaning, remain complicit in the visual economies of consumption. My work operates instead at the level of ontological recalibration. It asks not “What is happening to the planet?” but rather, “Why do you still imagine yourself as separate from it?”

My most recent project, Ambulatory Carbon Negation (Preliminary Phase), consisted of walking extremely slowly along a disused coastal footpath while thinking intensely about emissions. Each step was undertaken with acute metabolic awareness. I hardly documented the walk. Documentation, after all, has a carbon footprint. The work exists firstly as a redistribution of atmospheric conscience, only secondly as ephemera and physical remembrances.

Some have asked whether walking can truly constitute Climate Art. This question betrays a lingering anthropocentric bias. Walking, when undertaken with sufficient intentionality, slowness, and conceptual density,becomes a form of planetary listening. The foot, correctly deployed, is an instrument of ethical attunement. I have always known this. I am gratified that the climate crisis has finally forced others to catch up with my intuition.

It is important to clarify that my pivot does not represent a rupture with my earlier work, but its logical maturation. My long-standing commitment to erasure, to leaving no trace, now reveals itself as a prescient refusal of carbon inscription. Where others are scrambling to retrofit sustainability into fundamentally extractive practices, I have merely articulated what was already embedded in mine.

I am cautious about the current proliferation of climate-themed art. Much of it mistakes urgency for depth, volume for impact. Climate Art is not about noise; it is about correctness. It is about aligning one’s practice so precisely with ecological ethics that it becomes, in effect, unimpeachable. This requires restraint, seriousness, and a willingness to be misunderstood by those who still confuse accessibility with virtue.

In the coming year, I will be developing a suite of works that further explore non-invasive presence, atmospheric humility, and the aesthetics of refusal. These may include standing still in weather systems, walking in places already damaged but refusing to acknowledge the damage, and thinking about glaciers indoors to avoid unnecessary travel.

I do not claim that my work will save the planet. That would be vulgar. What it will do, quietly, rigorously, and without compromise, is model a way of being an artist that is no longer ethically optional. If that feels uncomfortable, it should. Discomfort is, after all, one of the few renewable resources we have left. Collectors may sponsor a walk, they may receive the odd photo, maybe a stick from the journey, or a well-chosen pebble. Nothing more.

Hackson Jollock: The Line Learns to Breathe

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At first encounter, the new monochrome work by Hackson Jollock appears almost evasive. Black lines wander across a white field with an air of studied indifference, looping, stuttering, accelerating, then hesitating as if the drawing were caught mid-thought and decided not to resolve itself for our benefit. There is no centre, no hierarchy, no obvious “way in.” And yet, after a moment, it becomes difficult to look away.

This is a work that operates by near-miss rather than declaration. The lines do not enclose forms; they brush past the idea of form. One feels the ghost of figures, maps, calligraphy, perhaps even animals or letters, but none are permitted to fully arrive. Meaning is constantly approached, then politely refused. In this sense, the drawing behaves less like an image and more like a rehearsal, an endless warm-up in which gesture practices being itself.

Monochrome suits Jollock. Stripped of colour, the work reveals its true subject: motion thinking aloud. The line becomes both actor and archive, recording not what the artist saw, but what his hand decided in real time. Each stroke carries the residue of a decision already abandoned. This is drawing as temporal event, not object; evidence of presence rather than product.

What is striking is the confidence with which the artist allows disorder to remain unresolved. The marks overlap without correction, collide without apology. There is no attempt to tidy, balance, or aestheticise the chaos. And yet the work never feels careless. On the contrary, it suggests a deep trust in the intelligence of movement itself, as though the hand knows something the mind would only ruin by interfering.

Jollock has often spoken of discovery rather than composition, and nowhere is that ethos clearer than here. This drawing feels “found” in the same way a path is found by walking it repeatedly. The image is not planned; it emerges from repetition, pressure, speed, and fatigue. It is, in effect, a portrait of duration.

One might be tempted, if one were feeling particularly academic, to describe the work as a deconstructed syntax, a grammar without nouns, a sentence composed entirely of conjunctions. But such language, while entertaining, only circles the point. The real achievement of this monochrome piece lies in its quiet insistence that meaning is not something imposed on marks, but something that flickers briefly when marks are allowed to behave honestly.

This is not a drawing that explains itself. It does not aspire to clarity, nor does it reward interpretation in any conventional sense. Instead, it invites attunement. Look long enough, and the scribbles begin to slow your own thinking; your eyes start following the rhythm of the hand that made them. You are no longer reading the work, you are keeping pace with it.

In a cultural moment obsessed with resolution, branding, and legibility, Hackson Jollock offers something altogether more subversive: a line that refuses to settle, and in doing so, reminds us that uncertainty can be both rigorous and beautiful.

“Visibility Is a Compromise”: A Conversation with R. Sallow; Proponent of Invisibilism at its Most Cutting Edge

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“Visibility Is a Compromise”: A Conversation with R. Sallow; Proponent of Invisibilism at its Most Cutting Edge

By Miley Merrot

I meet R. Sallow in a café that he insists is not the café we are sitting in. This, he explains gently, is already part of the work. Sallow is among the younger generation of Invisibilism artists, though “younger” here refers less to age than to degree of withdrawal. His recent exhibition, Peripheral Withdrawal, consisted of three weeks during which nothing changed, and was widely positively reviewed.

He speaks carefully, as though words themselves might overexpose something.

Q: Your work is often described as “more invisible than invisible.” What does that actually mean?

Sallow: It means I’m no longer interested in absence as an effect. Absence can become decorative. I’m interested in withholding even the idea of absence. If you notice that something isn’t there, I’ve already failed.

Q: That sounds almost hostile to the viewer.

Sallow: Not hostile. No. Demanding? Yes. I think viewers have been trained to expect art to meet them halfway. Invisibilism insists they walk the entire distance alone. Or don’t walk at all.

Q: Your last piece, Untitled (Deferred), was acquired before it was announced. Sorry if this is a very basic question, but…What was purchased?

Sallow: A delay. An agreement that a work may occur, but probably won’t. The collector owns the responsibility of waiting.

Q: Does that make the collector a collaborator?

Sallow: Inevitably. Ownership is participation. Especially when there’s nothing to point to.

Q: Some critics argue Invisibilism risks becoming a luxury gesture. Absence as status symbol.

Sallow: Luxury is simply what happens when price rises high enough. I don’t worry about that. Yves Klein sold the void for gold. The gold was the vulgar part.

Q: You trained originally as a sculptor. What changed?

Sallow: Sculpture taught me that material always overstates itself. Even dust wants attention. I became interested in forms that don’t announce. Eventually I realised the most ethical sculpture is one that declines to exist.

Q: Your studio practice is famously opaque. Do you actually make anything?

Sallow: I rehearse restraint. I take notes that I later unwrite. I build frameworks that I dismantle before they harden into form. Sometimes I begin a piece and stop halfway through the intention.

Q: I see. Could you explain that further?

Sallow: No. Explanation is futile.

Q: OK. Is there a moment when you know that a work that you cannot see is finished?

Sallow: Yes. When there is nothing left to remove.

Q: Could you explain just a little more?

Sallow: Certainly…Not.

Q: You’ve been linked, loosely, to the so-called “Second Wave” of Invisibilism. Do you accept that label?

Sallow: Labels are for foodstuffs. Invisibilism, if it survives, will do so by erasing its own genealogy.

Q: What would you say to someone encountering your work for the first time and feeling… confused?

Sallow: Confusion is proximity. Clarity is distance. If they’re confused, they’re already closer than they think. Just keep looking.

Q: At nothing?

Sallow: At the work.

Finally I ask Sallow what he’s working on next. He pauses for a long time, then says “Nothing. But more rigorously.”

Doodle Pip, Portrait of a Friend II (But which one?!)

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This latest work by Doodle Pip arrives already trailing a wake of anticipation. In a market and critical climate hungry for the new yet suspicious of sincerity, Pip’s portraits, so resolutely uninterested in resemblance, have become unexpectedly coveted objects. Portrait of a Friend II (But which one?!) continues the artist’s sustained dismantling of verisimilitude, offering not a likeness but a proposition: that portraiture might operate most truthfully when it abandons truth as appearance.

At a glance, the drawing proposes a face, but only just. A continuous, nervously assured line loops and doubles back on itself, sketching a head that seems to flicker between emergence and erasure. Features are present only insofar as they are necessary to be undone: an eye collapses into a slash, the nose becomes an ideogram, the mouth drifts off register. The line never settles; it worries at itself, performing a kind of graphic thinking aloud. What we witness is not depiction but process. Here is drawing as event rather than image.

Art historically, Pip’s work situates itself in a rich counter-tradition to mimetic portraiture. If Renaissance portraiture sought to stabilise identity through physiognomy, and modernism fractured the face to reveal multiple perspectives, Pip goes further still, refusing the premise that the sitter must be recoverable at all. One thinks of Giacometti’s existential attenuations, Cy Twombly’s scribbled semiotics, or the automatic line of Surrealist drawing, but stripped of their respective heroic gravitas. Pip’s line is lighter, quicker, and deliberately unserious, yet the conceptual stakes are no less profound.

Critic and curator Helena Voss describes Pip’s portraits as “acts of productive disrespect.”

“What Doodle Pip disrespects,” Voss notes, “is the idea that a person can be summarised visually. These drawings don’t fail at likeness,they refuse it. And that refusal feels ethical as much as aesthetic.”

Indeed, the artist’s well-documented position that recognisability constitutes failure reorients the viewer’s expectations. In this Portrait of a Friend, friendship is not encoded through familiarity of features but through the freedom to misrepresent. The sitter becomes a pretext rather than a subject, a catalyst for line rather than its destination. This is portraiture emptied of its traditional obligation and refilled with contingency, speed, and doubt.

Another critic, James Leroux, situates Pip’s popularity within a broader cultural fatigue with hyper-definition.

“We live in an era of faces that are endlessly tagged, filtered, and biometricised,” Leroux argues. “Pip’s work is radical because it opts out. These drawings cannot be indexed. They cannot be recognised by a machine, or, crucially, by us. That’s why collectors want them. They’re buying a form of escape.”

That escape is palpable in the drawing’s looseness. The line oscillates between confidence and collapse, suggesting a hand that trusts its instincts while sabotaging its own authority. There is no centre of gravity, no compositional hierarchy; the image refuses to resolve into a stable whole. And yet, paradoxically, it feels complete. The work knows when to stop, not because it has arrived at likeness, but because it has exhausted the need for it.

In this sense, the piece can be read as a quiet manifesto. It asserts that identity is not something to be captured but something to be circled, missed, and abandoned. That a portrait may function not as a mirror but as a trace of time spent looking, of a hand moving, of an artist thinking against tradition.

As Pip’s work continues to be avidly sought after, it is tempting to frame their success as ironic: drawings that look like doodles commanding serious attention. But this misreads the project. These are not casual marks elevated by context; they are rigorously anti-illusory works that understand art history well enough to misbehave within it. In refusing to show us who the sitter is, Doodle Pip shows us something else entirely: the limits of seeing, and the strange freedom that emerges once those limits are embraced.

The Travel Journal of Chester Hubble

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The Travel Journal of Chester Hubble

Second Walk

After the tunnel, I wanted height. Not elevation in the romantic sense, but the kind that exposes your balance and makes you wobble. I chose the upper ring road of a multistorey car park in Milton Keynes, which I have long suspected was designed by someone who disliked horizons.

I arrived early, before the cars had finished clocking in for the day. The building was still warm from yesterday’s engines, exhaling faintly, like a concrete animal. I began on the ramp, walking against the arrows, which is to say against intention. This is important. Arrows are bossy. They assume urgency.

The car park reveals itself to me slowly. Each level is the same idea, though with a different opinion about the importance of light. I climbed until the ramps ran out and the sky arrived abruptly, as if someone had removed a lid. Up here, the town arranged itself into a diagram: roundabouts like punctuation marks, trees pretending to be labels on a flowchart. Milton Keynes is famous for its grids, but from above they soften, as if confused by their certainty.

I walked the perimeter. This was the rule I set: one full lap, no shortcuts. The edge had a low wall that invited parkour. I declined.

What surprised me was the sound. At this height, traffic becomes aural liquid. The rush below was no longer aggressive; it was tidal. I found myself matching my pace to it, a collaboration between feet and traffic flow. Occasionally a car arrived on my level, circled me like a cautious animal, then left. I nodded, they looked confused as I used the space incorrectly.

Halfway round, I stopped again. This is becoming a habit. I took out a small piece of chalk I carry for emergencies. I marked the floor with a thin line, then stepped over it repeatedly, counting not steps but hesitations. How many times does the body flinch at a meaningless boundary? The answer, it turns out, is more than you’d like.

Clouds drifted through the open roof like uninvited critics. Shadows slid across the concrete, temporary paintings I could not keep. I thought about my studio, about how much effort I expend trying to make work that feels unfinished. Here, everything was already at the dress rehearsal.

As the day filled the building with cars, the walk changed character. The perimeter became a negotiation. Engines coughed. Doors slammed. Someone asked if I was lost. I said yes, which was accurate but unhelpful.

When I finally descended, the ramps felt steeper, as if gravity had been rehearsing without me. At the bottom, I wrote: I walked around a town without entering it. I borrowed its roof and gave it my time.

The journey ended not with arrival but with a ticket machine refusing my coins.

THE PRE-ABSTRACTIONIST MANIFESTO

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THE PRE-ABSTRACTIONIST MANIFESTO

Pimlico Wilde does not subscribe to this manifesto, we publish it here to show the direction that some of the art world is taking

We, The Pre-Abstractionists declare the following truths:

2. The world is already abstract: wind over water, brick over brick, shadow across cheekbone. The artist does not need to invent abstraction, he needs to rescue the real from abstraction’s decay.

1. Abstract art was a mistake. It is a desert of forms, a false transcendence, a betrayal of the image. It reduced painting to ornament, to the humming of lines without flesh, to color stripped of consequence.

3. The so-called revolutionaries of abstraction strangled the visible world in their pursuit of purity. Purity is poison. Art is not pure. Art is impure, heavy, dirty, embodied, historical.

4. We dance on Kandinsky’s geometry, we laugh at Mondrian’s prison grids, we renounce Malevich’s black square, which is nothing but a tombstone for painting.

5. We are the Pre-Abstractionists: not “neo-,” not “post-,” but before. We restore the power of the world before it was amputated from sight. We reach backward to leap forward.

6. The future of art is not blank canvas and theory. The future of art is form married to matter, image married to meaning.

7. Representation is not regression. The tree, the hand, the wound, the face: they are inexhaustible. One blade of grass contains more terror and beauty than a thousand sterile triangles.

8. Our task is reconstruction. To repaint the visible world with ferocity, to refuse the easy escape of abstraction, to drown color in weight, to rebuild the image until it trembles.

9. We do not seek nostalgia. We do not seek comfort. We seek the terrible, eternal present, the real that bleeds.

10. Pre-Abstractionism is not like other art movements. It is a correction. It is the knife that cuts through the gauze abstraction has wrapped around our eyes.

THE CALL

Painters, sculptors, photographers, printmakers: abandon the false heaven of pure form. Return to the earth. Seize the real. Paint the unpaintable not by escaping it, but by facing it.

The Pre-Abstractionists begin now.

Things to do in London this Weekend

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Things to do in London this Weekend

by conceptual artist and blogger Things to do in London this Weekend.

A curated moment in time, best consumed with a flat white you don’t enjoy

Cinema

Get down to the river to see The Thames, Reimagined (Dir. Anselma Krohn-Weiss)

A six-hour, dialogue-free meditation on the emotional life of river water, screened once nightly beneath Waterloo Bridge. Shot entirely on expired 16mm film stock “rescued” from a Lithuanian attic, the film explores liquidity as a metaphor for late-stage desire. Audience members are encouraged (but not required) to cry quietly whilst wearing biodegradable ponchos. Interval kombucha provided.

Rom-Com (Technically)

A re-edited version of Notting Hill in which every smile has been removed using AI. Hugh Grant remains, but joy does not. Showing at a members-only microcinema in Dalston that doesn’t list its address online.

Art Galleries

“Soft Architecture for Hard Times” , Purple Cube Bermondsey

A room filled with foam replicas of brutalist buildings that slowly deflate over the course of the exhibition. By Sunday afternoon, the Barbican has fully collapsed. The artist Plinkett Havers describes the work as “a comment on municipal grief.” Visitors nod gravely.

Unnamed Exhibition (Because Naming Is Hierarchical)

A pop-up gallery in a former vape shop in Soho presents 43 identical canvases painted in “variations of off-white trauma.” Each is priced differently. None are for sale to you.

Theatre: Performance as Endurance

Someone Reads Their Google Search History Aloud

A sold-out immersive theatre experience in Peckham where a lone performer recounts ten years of private searches (“how long is too long to grieve,” “is it weird to feel nothing”). The audience sits on yoga mats. There is no applause.

Shakespeare, But Wet

King Lear performed knee-deep in reclaimed rainwater at an undisclosed Hackney warehouse. The storm scene lasts 47 minutes. Critics have called it “unavoidable.”

Ballet & Movement

Stillness No. 4

A ballet in which nothing happens for the first 20 minutes. Then, one dancer blinks. Choreographed by a former neuroscientist who insists this is the point. At Sadler’s Wells, obviously.

Pilates Swan Lake

A reinterpretation of Swan Lake performed by eight dancers and one rowing machine. The swan is capitalism. The lake is core strength.

Walking Tours: Moving Through Space With Intent

The Ghosts of Pretend Poverty

A guided walk through areas of East London “before they were interesting,” led by a former lifestyle editor who remembers when oat milk was ironic. Includes stops where something used to be authentic.

Silent Disco Psychogeography

Participants walk through the City of London wearing headphones that play conflicting academic lectures on dérive, while a guide occasionally whispers, “Notice how this makes you feel.” Nobody knows what they’re feeling, but they’re feeling it deeply.

Bonus Event

Ceramics & Grief Brunch

A two-hour workshop in which you mould a bowl while discussing loss, followed by eggs Benedict, which by tradition you don’t finish. Everyone leaves with something slightly misshapen and emotionally unresolved.