Soho Connections: Artist Takeover at Shaftesbury Avenue
Friday 7th March 2025 – Sunday 9th March 2025 , 12:00pm to 6:00pm
Bow Arts presents a takeover of Shaftesbury’s ex-office buildings led by the Soho Connections artists in residence. Taking place over a weekend in March, experience exhibitions, performances, workshops, talks and more.
Over three days and across four floors, Bow Arts is delighted to present a sprawling and vivid programme of events, installations, activations, and exhibitions put together by the artists working inside Shaftesbury Avenue.
Alongside the live performances, talks and workshops listed below, artists will be showcasing artworks and works-in-progress inside their studio spaces for visitors to explore.
Friday 7th March: 6pm – 8pm
18:15 – 18:30 – I. Nakhla More than a game
For the Artist Takeover at Shaftsbury Avenue, I. Nakhla will perform a mashup of audio research compiled throughout their residency. A mixture of experimental sound and music, Nakhla will present their current research on the rise of women’s football, alongside pieces from their ongoing musical practice.
I. Nakhla is an artist, musician, and educator. Through sound, music, performance, and installation they build sonic worlds. Attuned to the sonic as place-maker, their practice figures the sonic as a site of the counter-archive, insisting on active pasts and urgent presences. Nakhla’s work prompts questions about what we consider to be space, place, and exhibition, making mischief with categories, rhythms, and keys. Nakhla has had work commissioned for The Southbank Centre, ARC, Stockton, IMT Gallery, NTS Radio and many more. Nakhla composes and produces audio for art films and video games. They release music under the moniker end measure.
@nakhla.iz
Free, drop in
18:30 – 19:00 – Aziza Kadyri and Ting Huang, Mom Said Two, Uncle Said Three
For the Artist Takeover, they will present a performance exploring the experience of living “in between” cultures. This project examines the conflicts, misunderstandings, and moments of connection that arise when navigating different cultural realities and how these experiences reshape identity. We invite participants to reflect on questions of belonging, adaptability, and resilience while living in cultural fusion and uncertainty. Through artistic expression and dialogue, the project aims to highlight these challenges, spark discussion, and create a space to explore how individuals and communities can build understanding and navigate life amidst cultural diversity and transformation. Through artistic expression and dialogue, the project aims to highlight these challenges, spark discussion, and create a space to explore how individuals and communities can build understanding and navigate life amidst cultural diversity and transformation.
Ting Huang is a costume and set designer specialising in experimental and cross-disciplinary performances. Her practice combines cultural storytelling with sustainable design. Ting has collaborated internationally with leading directors and renowned ensembles, bridging art forms across dance, opera, and theatre to create innovative, immersive experiences.
Aziza Kadyri is a visual artist working with experimental textiles, installations, and emerging technologies. Her work merges collaboration and interdisciplinary methods, creating immersive experiences rooted in participatory engagement. Kadyri explores themes like migration, identity, and language, reimagining cultural heritage through XR and AI. She represented Uzbekistan at the 60th Venice Biennale and has exhibited globally.
@tiiing_huang @aziza.kadyri
tinghuang.cargo.site www.azizakadyri.com
Free, drop in
19:00 – 19:15 – Floor is Lava: performance by Kate Mahony
As part of the Floor is Lava exhibition, artist Kate Mahony will be performing amidst the 40 sculptures in the ex-office space.
Free, drop in
19:15 – 20:00 – Adam Moore, Farther. Like a dream unfinished into ever
Farther. Like a dream unfinished into ever is a journey through grief and loss using moving image, music and dance. Projected photographs and video documenting Adam’s first trip back to his father’s country after his death move over the space, the artist’s body and (indirectly) other people. Dancing into memories of our hometown, Soufriére. Retracing his impressions of once familiar journey’s they’d made there together as locals, then most recently as a tourist without him. And here, now, displaced. Moving with disintegrating memories, homes, grief and loss, with tenderness the artist searches for their place moment by moment. Farther.
Adam Moore is a transdisciplinary artist, dancer, and writer of Caribbean and European heritage born and based in London. Discrete experimental forms house him in works across drawing and painting, photography and print, ceramics, sculpture, video, text and sound. Giving primacy to the embodied and experiential, choreographic and relational, material and spatial his work accumulates across mediums into performance, installation, design, public art, and site-related interventions with collaborative socially engaged forms. His work chimeras sprawling to reimagine with concision the structures and systems in the world around him and the patterns and symmetry from which they project.
@adammooreart
adammoorecreate.com
Free, drop in
Saturday 8th March: 12pm – 6pm
12:00 – 13:30 – Aziza Kadyri and Ting Huang, Cultural Tug-of-War
Join Ting and Aziza for TUG-OF-WAR, a physically interactive, thought-provoking, and absurdly fun workshop where they turn cultural tension into a game.
A physical Tug-of-War, but instead of just strength, we pull with our values, identities, and conflicts. The workshop invites participants to reflect on questions of belonging, adaptability, and resilience while living in cultural fusion and uncertainty.
Free, must RSVP book here
12:00 – 16:00 – Diario Textil: Weaving workshop
Join Lucía Scarselletta in this drop-in weaving workshop, creating a new large-scale piece: Diario Textil.
Over the past few weeks at Shaftesbury Avenue, Lucía has been working with Latinx communities to host weaving workshops as a space to share migrant narratives and improve manual skills using repurposed materials, weaving in lap looms and embroidering.
Lucía’s micro-residency has been led by community arts organisation Get It Done, supporting communities to address social issues through creativity and collective action.
Free, drop in
14:00 – 14:30 – Adam Moore, Exploring critical spatial practices
Adam Moore explores using site and place as creative partners across his practice, and hypothetically at 125 Shaftesbury Avenue.
@adameastlondon
Free, drop in
15:00 – 16:00 – Talk: How To be A Good Immigrant, drop in
A talk exploring the experience of living “in between” cultures. Examining the conflicts, misunderstandings, and moments of connection that arise when navigating different cultural realities and how these experiences reshape identity. We invite participants to reflect on questions of belonging, adaptability, and resilience while living in cultural fusion and uncertainty.
Free, drop in
16:30 – 17:30 – Peyvand Sadeghian and Matthew Robison, Apolune: Systems Normal
Apolune: Systems Normal is a multidisciplinary interrogation of humanity’s fraught relationship with progress, using the Apollo 11 mission as a prism to explore the dissonance between institutional ambition and the granular realities of individual lives. By reimagining NASA’s archival materials through a neurodivergent lens, the work critiques the flattening effect of dominant historical narratives while celebrating the intricate human labour embedded within institutional records. It is a project that seeks to unearth the overlooked, the marginal, and the ephemeral, transforming the archive from a repository of facts into a living, breathing site of possibility.
Peyvand Sadeghian’s core discipline is theatre, they are an interdisciplinary performer and maker. As well as a jobbing actor for stage and screen, they have their own practice that encompasses text, performance, puppetry and multimedia. They’ve collaborated and led on projects that have operated in different contexts and modes, but they usually centre around live performance and communal settings. Themes often include memory, officialdom, liminality, and the [re]construction of the self. Peyvand’s work is shaped by a mixed immigrant/refugee background, through a neurodivergent lens, and a working-class voice. There work often merges dark humour with sharp social critique, incorporating multimedia elements such as video, stop-motion animation, and interactivity to create layered, immersive experiences. Peyvand aims to make work that is both intimate and incisive, offering up a different perspective.
Matthew is a visual artist specialising in experimental film and narrative theory. His installations, which merge projection mapping with archival materials, have exhibited internationally. Notable projects include Glacial Waters (Goethe-Institut/EU Creative Commission), a multi-channel holographic film exploring climate change, and the Baden Projekt, an immersive installation examining urban nature and wellbeing. He brings extensive expertise in technical innovation and experiential design to theatrical contexts.
www.matthewrobinson.art
Free, drop in
Sunday 9th March: 12pm – 6pm
10:00 – 17:00 – Toe Press x Isis Menteeth Wheelright Necessity: a workshop and in conversation in housing, security and gentrification
Panel talk: 11:30 – 12:30: drop in
Q&A: 12:30 – 13:00, drop in
Workshop: 14:00 – 17:00, limited spaces book here
Toe Press’ first full day workshop of writing, collaborating, thinking and zine making. Featuring a Drop In panel conversation with a mixture of anti-racism charities and youth homelessness charity, such as Centrepoint and Runnymede Trust, to inspire thought around temporary accommodation, racialised inequities and growing insecurity in the London housing market.
Following with a 5 Hole Zine construction and writing tasks to fill out your take home zine. Allowing each of the participants to complete a piece of work bringing their beliefs and experiences into printed form and inspiring thought for political action.
Tickets are for attendance at the afternoon zine workshop only, entrance to the panel and warm-up exercise is free.
Zine facilitators: Marcie Lewis, Tati El Mallah and Isis Menteeth Wheelright
14:30 – 16:00 – Artist panel talk, led by Owen Herbert
An artist panel talk led by resident Owen Herbert, a constructive dialogue about some of the process, influences, research and questions addressed by several artists’ work in the Artist Takeover.
Free, drop in
Featured Exhibitions
Floor 5
Sorry about the mess
A group exhibition of work by visual artists and writers who are also mothers, exploring the evolving relationship between motherhood and making art.
Floor 6
Soho Connections: End of Residency Show
Featuring artists: Val Jumo, Julius Reuben, Eva Gomez-Lang, Mimi Dearing, Adam Moore, Joao Ibraime Atumane de Carvalho, Oliver Silva Pinto Collins, Sean Orr, Hannah Watson, Xinyu Liu. Curated by Owen Herbert.
Image: Eva Gomez-Lang, @http.www.co.uk
The Floor is Lava
Taking place in the ex-office spaces at Shaftesbury Avenue, The Floor is Lava presents a modular stage, inviting 40 artists to showcase sculptural works that disrupt and subvert the utilitarian architecture of the office environment.
Splash & Grab: Dream States
Splash & Grab publishes articles and magazines, curates exhibitions, mentors photographers and works with charities and non-profits. S&G have worked with ten early career photographers and visual artists at Shaftesbury Avenue. They have curated an exhibition, Dream States, of the work created during the residency and will be hosting an open studios during the artist takeover.
Featuring artists: Toe Press, Marcie Lewis, Tati El Mallah, Different Gravy, Alex Picasso, Louie Stewart, Hannah Geeds, Max Ferguson, Myles Bailey, Hayleigh Longman, Jannell Adufo, Lulu Wang, Sana Badri, Tolu Elusade.
splashandgrab.co.uk
Image: www.jannelladufo.co.uk
Floor 8
HACK 8558
Artist-teachers Siobhan Tate & Marq Kearey bring together 28 artists over two artist collectives to produce an exhibition to mark the end of their time in residence at Shaftesbury Avenue.
Screenings
Floor 5: Hallie Primus – Details TBA
Floor 6: Existers –Details TBA
Artists
About the Soho Connections Residency
The Soho Connections Residency provides support for community focused arts practices and projects. Offering time to develop experimental and open-ended projects that respond to the artists’ communities, as well as themes of city, space, place, and home, among others, the artists currently in residence in the building will work alongside each other; co-workers in the office warren at Shaftesbury Avenue.
The residency prioritises individuals and small organisations accessing space for the first time, encouraging site specific performances and practices. Participating artists include sound artists, photographers, digital artists, community organisations, performance artists, and more.
Opening the doors to the ex-office space, expect exhibitions, workshops and wildly imaginative projects from the talented artists working from Shaftesbury Avenue.
Artists In Residence:
Xinyu Liu, Owen Herbert, Adam Moore, Different Gravy, Junior Atumane, Mimi Dearing, Lucía Scarselletta, I. Nakhla, Ruth Angel Edwards, Adam Gallagher, Rachel Mortlock, Janek Nixon, India Stanbra, Lulu Wang, Sana Badri, Jannell Adufo, Val Juma, Julius Reuben, Toe Press, Ting Huang, Aziza Kadyri, Alexandra Steinacker, Peyvand Sadeghian, Matthew Robinson, Sara Rahman, Sean Orr, Marq Kearey, Siobhan Tate, WIT Collective, Apolune: Systems Normal, Existers, Get It Done, Babe Station.
Access Information
Shaftesbury Avenue has step free access throughout from street level, including to an accessible toilet. The upper floors are accessible via lifts. 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 shaftesbury@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 seat near the entrance) or anything else you can think of!
Transport Information
Nearest train station(s): Picadilly Circus (Picadilly, Bakerloo), Tottenham Court Road (Elizabeth Line, Central, Northern)
Bus: 9, 12, 14, 22, 23, 24, 29, 19, 38, 88, 94, 139, 176, 453
Parking: No parking available.
Bike: No bike shed on site.
