Bow Open: Connections
Friday 6th June 2025 – Sunday 31st August 2025 , 10:00am to 4:00pm
Bow Arts marks its 30th anniversary with the Bow Open show, featuring 22 artists whose works explore the ties that bind and divide, celebrating three decades of art and community impact
Private view: Friday 20 June, 6-9pm
Bow Arts’ alumni Bobby Baker, Nye Thompson and Albert Potrony celebrate 3 decades of bringing art and communities together with selections of work responding to the provocation of ‘Connections’.
Featuring works by: Madi Acharya-Baskerville, Bobby Baker, Eva Barkardóttir, Flora Bradwell, Gabrielle Brooks, Fiona Chambers, Russell Davies, Frankie Fathers, Eric Fong, Tom Foulsham, Green (Yong Woon Park), Rebecca Griffiths, iella, Campbell McConnell, Vibin n Marblin, Joanna Penso, Albert Potrony, Nowshin Prenon, Nye Thompson, Tara Versey , Jane Wu
(2022)
The show spans sculpture, sound, painting, print, installations and digital artwork, including captivating live performances. Probing and thought-provoking, the curators’ selections such as Madi Achariya-Baskerville’s intricately textured mixed-media piece Hennafest (2017) and Joanna Penso’s meandering sonic journey, The River in You (2023), explore the intimacy of relationships with the body, family, and friends while also examining the global connections that bind communities, nations, systems, and natural forces in a complex web.
The collection also includes playful and tender provocations, like Tom Foulsham’s Slipping (2022), a hand-stitched silk house moving through itself in a continuous cycle, and Gabrielle Brooks’ Love Letters (2020), where scam emails become a meditative means to reflect on online connections. Elsewhere, Campbell McConnell’s The Players (2024) humorously bridges past and present through the pre-performance warm-up of actors.
Public Programme Coming Soon
Image: Frankie Fathers Wigwam for a Goose’s Bridle Photograph by Saru
More about the Bow Open
The Bow Open is Bow Arts’ annual showcase of astonishing artwork created exclusively by our Studio Holders, Affordable Housing residents and Artist Educators. Each year, a different guest curator is invited to select the work. For our 30th anniversary we have three guest curators; Bobby, Albert and Nye have each had a studio with Bow Arts so bring an embedded insight and commitment to the selection process in this special year.
More about the curators
Bobby Baker’s acclaimed intersectional feminist practice includes performance, drawing, and installation, and persistently exposes the undervalued and stigmatised aspects of women’s daily lives, exemplified by pioneering works such as Drawing on a Mother’s Experience (1988) and Kitchen Show (1991). Bobby is currently installing An Edible Family in a Mobile Home at the Whitworth Gallery, having remade it in 2023 as part of Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970–1990 at Tate Britain. Bobby originally had a studio in Stratford and the area, including our beloved Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park, was a testing ground for her Roving Diagnostic Unit (2015).
Albert Potrony’s participatory practice examines ideas of identity, community and language. Albert is interested in generating social spaces through his projects, and participation from diverse groups and individuals is a key element of his work. Recent projects include equal play (2021-2022), a play installation, reading space and participatory project looking at equality and care through the lens of childcare and men’s roles in it and The Achilles Heel Project, researching anti sexist men’s groups of the 70s and 80s, who were striving for a new type of masculinity that would embrace and support Feminism. For the past five years Albert has been developing MORTALS, a participatory art and research project that seeks to address our own mortality; exploring ageing, care, loss, grief and death with diverse groups and collectives. Albert was with Bow Arts from the very start, helping to establish our first home on Bow Road. He worked as one of our Artist Educators, bringing participatory projects to schools and communities in east London.
Nye Thompson is an artist turned software designer turned artist. Her work spans image-making, video and sculptural installation, filmmaking, experimental software architectures and process-based performance. Nye made the world’s first horror film for machines and has exchanged postcards with orbiting satellites. In 2021 she received the Lumen Prize Gold Award with UBERMORGEN for their AI film UNINVITED. Nye currently works from her studio in Bow Road and was lead artist for Visions Bow Arts’ renowned biennial exhibition of moving image, digital and performance art in 2020.
