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#FirstThursday: Visions presents an evening of performances and a celebration of ‘To Take a Leaf out of a Book’ by Good Wives and Warriors
Thursday 6th November 2025 , 6:00pm to 9:00pm
Alongside our First Thursday late opening and the closing party of Good Wives and Warriors at Nunnery Café, Visions presents a special evening of live performances What Have I To Do With Thee (2025) by Julian Alexander, Three Dusty Springfields Having a Foodfight (2025) by Rosemary Jane Cronin and Katie Wants To Buy A House (2025) by Katie Houston.
Performance Schedule
7:00pm – Julian Alexander, What Have I To Do With Thee (2025)
An ongoing experimental multi-media project that explores the work of William Blake as hip-hop artefact. Mixing screen, music, and live performance we borrow from Blake’s own multi-disciplinary practice to create what Julian can only describe as a mixtape. Part documentary, part concert, part lecture, all rap.
The title What Have I To Do With Thee is borrowed from Blake’s poem To Tirzah where he questions his faith, but when Julian uses this he can’t help but question his own relationship with Blake and why he feels obligated to remix his work.
The performance interrogates Blake and the performer alike while questioning the importance of his work and works like it and allowing us to see Blake and Hip-Hop in a new light.
7:30pm – Rosemary Jane Cronin, Three Dusty Springfields Having a Foodfight (2025) – Please note that this performance is cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances. We understand that this may be disappointing news, and we apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.
Three performers dressed as Dusty Springfield have a food fight. This piece is born from the biographical fact that Dusty would have food fights to deal with the pressure of being a ‘perfect’ and ‘desired’ female popstar, when underneath she was repressing that she had to hide her sexuality due to the times and her career. Her most famous food fight was in a revolving restaurant in Los Angeles. Springfield famously sang with friend Dionne Warwick for fun one night at the City Arms – an old pub on the Isle of Dogs not too far from the Nunnery.
8:00pm – Katie Houston, Katie Wants To Buy A House (2025)
Katie performs intuitively. She is as much a witness as the audience—often surprised by what unfolds. Although she has a lot of anxiety in this world the fear of being too honest is not there. Day to day, she slips into made-up roles: pretending to be pregnant on the phone with a boyfriend who warns her not to cycle. In performance, she weaves between biography and invention, blurring them until make-believe feels real.
It’s not about what’s real, more about what feels authentic to her. In her performance she attempts to follow sensations—climbing stairs, hearing a washing machine, touching the domestic. Toys, appliances, gestures—all become portals into belonging, desire, and the edges of play.
This event will take place across Bow Arts Bow Road site, 181-183 Bow Road, London, E3 2SJ. Doors of the Nunnery Gallery will open at 6pm, with the Visions in the Nunnery exhibition opening, performances at Bow Arts Courtyard running from 7pm to 8:30pm. The Nunnery Café will be open from 6-9pm, selling their usual fare of delicious drinks and snacks.
More about Julian Alexander
Julian Alexander is a writer-director from Las Cruces, New Mexico, currently based in the UK. He has an interest in social justice narratives spanning genre.
Julian is a graduate of NMSU’s Creative Media Institute where he completed his first short film, Buffalo, starring Craig Tate (Twelve Years A Slave) and continued his education at the Northern Film School in Leeds, UK, culminating in two short films: Léo – nominated for Best Post Graduate Film at the Royal Television Awards and featured in BAFTA-qualifying festivals such as Camerimage, Cambridge, Aesthetica, and Encounters Film Festival – and Beat Blue, a police drama told entirely in rhyme starring Lana Young (A Jazzman’s Blues, WandaVision), featured in the Oscar-qualifying Bermuda International Film Festival and Taos Shortz Film Festival.
When not leading a film set, Julian leads a classroom as Senior Lecturer and Course Leader in Film at the University of East London.
More about Rosemary Jane Cronin
Rosemary Jane Cronin is an artist, writer and lecturer with a research-based practice focusing on gender, psychoanalysis and subversion. The work is realised through film, performance, paint, print and sculpture. Cronin has exhibited at Tate Britain, The Freud Museum, ICA London, National Portrait Gallery, Transition Gallery, South London Gallery and The Wallace Collection. Film piece ‘Reverie’ was selected by the Guggenheim Foundation as part of their Under the Same Sun season in 2016.
More about Katie Houston
Working from London and Scotland, Katie’s work is fed by sensation and play. Making up and watching. Creating the feeling of a moment or a memory. Fluid and full of movement, at once ancient craft and brightly modern, she catches stories and disperses them through thread, paint and voice.
Part of the 2024 MASS sculpture cohort founded by Marcus Harvey and Helen Hayward, Houston’s practice spans textiles, sculpture, painting and performance. In 2018 her residency in Mexico at Arquetopia explored traditional Mexican textile techniques in Wahaca. Houston works with those techniques to create giant hand-embroidered line-works on plastic and silk, and bold, emotive installations and sculptures.
In October 2024, Houston held her first solo residency and exhibition, at the Outhouse, Camberwell.
Access information
The Nunnery Gallery, Café and Bow Arts Courtyard have step-free access throughout from street level, including to the accessible toilet, and is service animal friendly. This venue does not have a hearing loop system. Accessible parking is not available on-site.
If you have any questions regarding accessibility at this venue or event, would like to make us aware of any access requirements that you have in advance of visiting, or would like this information in an alternate format including Easy Read, please email nunnery@bowarts.com or call 020 8980 7774 (Ext. 3)
Access requirements could include things like providing equipment, services or support (e.g. information in Easy Read, speech to text software, additional 1:1 support), adjusting workshop timings (e.g. more break times), adjustments to the event space (e.g. making sure you have a table near the entrance) or anything else you can think of!
Transport Information
Opening hours: Wed-Sun, 10am to 4pm
Address: Nunnery Gallery, 181 Bow Road, London, E3 2SJ
Nearest station(s): Bow Road (District and Hammersmith and City lines) is a 6-minute walk away, and Bow Church (DLR) is a 3-minute walk away.
Bus: 205, 25, 425, A8, D8, 108, 276, 488 and 8 all service the surrounding area.
Bike: Bicycle parking is located at Bow Church Station. The nearest Santander Cycles docking station is at Bow Church Station.
More about Visions
Visions offers an informed overview of the provocative and quick-changing mediums of moving image and performance, presenting works from across the world. For each Visions we run two to three programmes and invite lead artists, renowned for their innovation in the digital field, to head and inspire each one. The ideas of the lead artists support the selection process and set the tone for the wider exhibition.
More information about the Visions in the Nunnery exhibition here.
