Gallery Celebrates 30 Years
Beaconsfield Gallery Vauxhall marks its 30th anniversary with Manifesto for Sustainable Experimentation, a landmark exhibition that honours three decades of groundbreaking artistic innovation while charting new territories of aesthetic and political resistance.
Curated by founding directors David Crawforth and Naomi Siderfin, this ambitious, evolving presentation reactivates past commissions alongside newly commissioned works, performances, and sonic interventions. At its core, the exhibition reaffirms Beaconsfield’s enduring role as a living laboratory for experimental art practice.
Featuring a dynamic group of artists including Sonia Boyce, Minna Haukka, A.L. Steiner, Trevor Mathison, Plastique Fantastique, Bruce Gilbert, BAW (Beaconsfield Art Works), and many more, the exhibition reveals the strategies artists use to persist, provoke, and be heard in turbulent times.
Sonia Boyce opens the celebration with a reprint of her 1995 Beaconsfield commission They’re Almost Like Twins, a powerful visual statement that once adorned the building’s exterior wall for the benefit of Southwestern Railway commuters.
Dubmorphology return to infiltrate the site with covert recording devices, amplifying the architecture itself – building and garden – as a responsive, sentient body.
Meanwhile, Minna Haukka turns archival excavation into live performance, using the gallery as both stage and studio. As the Beaconsfield archive prepares to move to its new home in Tate Britain, Haukka’s ongoing presence reanimates forgotten moments, overlooked projects, and early appearances by artists such as Tracey Emin, Mark Wallinger and Bob and Roberta Smith, who have since become cultural fixtures.
Beaconsfield, 22 Newport Street, Vauxhall, London, SE11 6AY
21 May – 2 August 2025 – Free admission
Gallery open Wednesday – Saturday 12.00 – 17.00
