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BETH GREENACRE
CURATORIAL
Current and forthcoming
Don’t Look Back
Curated by Sigrid Kirk and Beth Greenacre
24th September - 26 October 2025
Unit Gallery, 3 Hanover Square London, W1S 1HD
 
Unit presents Don’t Look Back, an energetic, multi-layered exhibition that channels the raw creative drive of the 1990s and early 2000s – an era defined by bold, irreverent gestures – into today’s world.
 
In a time marked by uncertainty and cultural pause, that same urgency feels vital now, with Don’t Look Back tapping into a renewed impulse to make, to gather and to act.Through painting, sculpture, performance and installation, the exhibition brings together a cross-generational group of artists whose work captures the restless momentum of collective creativity.
 
Curated by Beth Greenacre and Sigrid Kirk, the exhibition re-examines the ‘90s &
Noughties through a contemporary lens – one that is more inclusive, diverse, and alive with possibility. Don’t Look Back celebrates the vitality, grit and humour found across different communities at that time, and how that spirit continues to evolve in its embrace of queer voices, powerful female identities and broader expressions of individuality that stretch far beyond the laddish narratives often attached to the period.
Past
The Owlers Project
A photographic exhibition by Gilbert McCarragher
Owlers, 1–2 West Street, Alfriston, BN26 5UX
19 - 30th August 2025
 
Photographer Gilbert McCarragher presents a new body of work created during his residency at Owlers, a late 16th-century cottage in Alfriston, Sussex. Rather than simply documenting the historic site, McCarragher explores its intangible qualities — time, memory, and atmosphere — through a series of photographs that transform traces of the past into poetic visual reflections.
 
The exhibition brings together details of the cottage’s architecture — chalk walls, dusty corners, and fleeting movements of light — enlarged and printed on Japanese paper, displayed in specially commissioned frames, and installed within the house itself. This immersive presentation blurs the line between the real and the imagined, drawing visitors into an uncanny experience of place and time.
 
Curated by Beth Greenacre, the project continues McCarragher’s ongoing investigation into architecture as a site of lived experience, following his acclaimed publication Prospect Cottage: Derek Jarman’s House (Thames & Hudson) and his solo photographic show of Prospect Cottage at Photo London, Somerset House in May 2024.
 
“I am drawn to the invisible as much as the visible,” says McCarragher. “In Owlers, I wanted to capture the way memory lingers in a space, the marks left by time that are felt as much as seen.”

​SXSW London 2025
2nd - 7th June
The inaugural London iteration of the festival, for which Beth Greenacre was Visual Arts Advisor.
 
Grounding
Curated by Beth Greenacre
Old Truman Brewery
Ely's Yard, Hanbury Street, London E1 6QR
 
Damien Roach’s ‘Grounding’ zoomed in on the tradition of landscape imagery through the lens of cutting-edge Generative AI and quantum physics. This immersive audiovisual installation explores the transient, fleeting, and ever-changing nature of land, matter, and the environment via the equally unstable ecology of the networked digital image. In its embrace of the constant motion and change observed across both the vastness of deep time and the microscopic scales of emergent quantum phenomena, Grounding’s never-repeating constellation of image and sound actively encouraged an engagement with non-linear, multiperspectival, non-anthropocentric ways of seeing. Borrowing the algorithmic eye of generative media, Grounding pointed toward an existentially vital emancipation from human-scaled forms of relation with time, matter, the Earth, and other lifeforms in the era of climate crisis and widespread sociopolitical uncertainty.
 
https://sxswlondonarts.com/grounding/
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Beautiful Collisions

Curated by Beth Greenacre
Christ Church Spitalfields
Commercial St London, E1 6LY
 
Beautiful Collisions brings together contemporary artists whose work reflects the significant impact of artists from the Caribbean diaspora on British art and culture. The exhibition celebrates how the Caribbean has enriched Britain. While the artists remind us of the historical injustices inflicted on the region and its people, they make space for joy, healing, and radical care.
 
The artists in Beautiful Collisions are dissidents from traditionally received knowledge. They honour pluralistic histories and cultures, celebrate displaced bodies and invisible stories, and unite us through shared experiences while elevating the experience of loss. At the same time as acknowledging the enduring traumas of slavery, each artist demonstrates the healing powers of art.
 
Beautiful Collisions occupies Christ Church, a site of worship which provides a poignant context for the work of Alberta Whittle, Alvaro Barrington, Denzil Forrester, Runkus, Tavares Strachan, and Zinzi Minott. Each artist explores sound, music, ritual, communal cohesion, and freedom of expression, drawing parallels with religions worldwide.
 
https://sxswlondonarts.com/beautiful-collisions/
 
Kristina Chan: Habitable Climes
The second exhibition of The Sunderland Collection Art Programme
Curated by Beth Greenacre
12th March - 30th April 2025
Canada House Gallery, Pall Mall E, London, SW1Y 5BL
 
Kristina Chan is an artist-photographer and printmaker who lives in London, and was born in Canada. Her exploration of The Sunderland Collection was informed by her long fascination with the process of mapmaking, and the tools used to chart the land, seas and skies – in her words, “the systems and scales we apply to the world.” Drawn to ideas about remote territories and changing, less-documented geographies, Chan embarked on two excursions, the first to the Arctic Circle via the Svalbard Channel, and the second to the Nevada Desert.
 
During these trips, she experienced extremes in landscapes and climatic conditions which inspired a feeling of “awe and caution”. She reflected on the subjective concept of ‘fact’ when it comes to recording territories, and the part that what she refers to as “fantasy and fallacy” plays in the creation of maps, measurements and visual records.
 
A pair of large-scale photographic composites, each arranged over eight panels, was central to the exhibition. Referencing the panoramic form of two rare 19th century Chinese maps in The Sunderland Collection - the "Blue China" world and sky maps, the works Polar Day and Polar Opposite, represent Chan’s reflections on the terrestrial and the celestial, and her evolving thoughts around the nature of interpretation and fact in image-making.
 
Other new works shown included a series of 16 etchings entitled Impossible Measures. For these works, Chan photographed a selection of historical instruments held in the Royal Geographical Society’s collection, including sextants belonging to Charles Darwin and Dr Livingstone. These Victorian tools were photographed behind frosted glass, and the resulting visual abstraction adds to the sense that their accuracy and meaning has blurred over time.
 
More info on the exhibition:
https://oculi-mundi.com/kristina-chan-habitable-climes
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Fathi Hassan: Shifting Sands 
The inaugural exhibition of The Sunderland Collection Art Programme
Curated by Beth Greenacre
31st May - 15th June 2024
Frieze No. 9 Cork Street, Gallery 3, London, W1S 3LL

Fathi Hassan: Shifting Sands opened during London Gallery Weekend at Frieze’s No.9 Cork Street gallery showing a new body of work alongside historic works selected by the artist in response to the collection.

Born in Cairo in 1957 to Egyptian and Nubian parents, Hassan moved from Egypt to study at the Naples Art School, graduating in 1984. He spent decades living and working in Italy, becoming an active participant in an avant-garde art scene which attracted international figures including Joseph Beuys, Andy Warhol and Hermann Nitsch. Hassan gained prominence in this time and in 1988 became one of the first artists of African heritage to be included in the Venice Art Biennale. Now based in Edinburgh, he works across photography, painting, drawing, and installation. During his immersion in The Sunderland Collection, Hassan contemplated the global confluence of ideas and peoples, the tides of cultural encounters, and his own personal history. Moving back and forth in time, the body of work that he has produced comprises a visually arresting, richly coloured tapestry of memories, concepts, historical figures, and Hassan’s distinctive artistic expression.

Link to the page for the physical exhibition: https://oculi-mundi.com/fathi-hassan-shifting-sands
Online exhibition: https://oculi-mundi.com/exhibitions/online/fathi-hassan-shifting-sands
Medium and Memory: Griselda Pollock and Gilane Tawadros, chaired by Beth Greenacre

Wednesday 1st November 2023 at Christie’s London
Organised by AWITA, in partnership with The Courtauld
 
A conversation moderated by Beth between two renowned art historians, writers and practitioners exploring why medium still matters to artists engaging with memory - personal, historical, cultural, forgotten, discovered, restored. 
 
Voicing the Sisterly Acts: a conversation with the Revd. Dr Ayla Lepine, Nerissa Taysom and Beth Greenacre, organised and chaired by Charlotte de Mille, The Courtauld.

Friday 27th October at The All Saints Chapel, 82-83 Margaret Street, London

​This in-conversation concluded the events programme organised to coincide with the exhibition Living Memory, which brought together three pivotal sculptures by Louise Bourgeois, a brand-new sound intervention by Nicolas Godin and paintings by Gideon Rubin made in response to the Chapel of All Saints, Margaret St.
 
The conversation contemplated site specificity in curatorial practice; the ways we are physically moved round or through a structured architectural space, and moved emotionally by it; the relation of liturgy to movement to practice in faith, and art; absence as potential presence; and sound as a conduit between the psychological and visceral.
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LIVING MEMORY: Louise Bourgeois, Nicolas Godin and Gideon Rubin
Curated by Beth Greenacre
28th September - 27th October 2023
The All Saints Chapel, 82-83 Margaret Street, London

https://www.livingmemoryexhibition.co.uk/

LIVING MEMORY: Louise Bourgeois, Nicolas Godin and Gideon Rubin is housed in a building of significance that provides a meaningful contribution to each artist’s practice as well as the viewer’s experience. 

Originally constructed as a convent in 1914, 82–83 Margaret Street and the All Saints Chapel at its rear, was the first purpose-built place of worship for the Society of All Saints Sisters of the Poor. Rich in cultural and historic interest, the chapel houses a wall painting from 1861 of the Crucifixion by John Richard Clayton, who chose to depict all the attendant saints as women. The content of the fresco, along with the convent’s purposeful legacy of care – it not only accommodated the first women’s order, but also served as a space for women – provides a poignant context in which to house the work of all three artists. 

Louise Bourgeois, Nicolas Godin and Gideon Rubin explore the materiality of their chosen media, the role that memory plays in the creative process and the transformative effects of art. And while Bourgeois and Rubin are united in examining the human form throughout their practices, it is the existential questions we ask ourselves beyond the physical body that also interest them. In particular both artists investigate the important role that remembrance and time play, not only in the creation of art, but also in how we understand ourselves, the world and our surroundings.

A PDF report on Living Memory can be found here.
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Image credit: Magnolia, 2023, oil on linen, 30.5 x 25.5 cm
Gideon Rubin: Yōga 
Co-curated by Beth Greenacre and Fraser Brough.

Co-curated with Fraser Brough at CASSIUS&Co., London. Yōga, is an exhibition of new paintings by Gideon Rubin, opening on 14th September 2023 in which the artist turns the tradition of European oil painting to a subject with which it is largely unfamiliar, the image of Japan. The new body of works are based on the rich history of postwar Japanese literature and photography and will be presented alongside a bookshelf exhibition of rare Japanese photo-books, some of which provided source material for the paintings in the exhibition.

Unlike the painters of ‘Japonisme’ in late 19th century France, who looked to printmakers like Hokusai and Hiroshige for their flattened surfaces and sense of perspective, Rubin has made paintings that look to Japan more for its literature than its printmaking. In works like Kawabata’s Snow Country, or Tanizaki’s Naomi, it is the sparsity of language, the elimination of description, that gives the writing its elegance. For his Yōga paintings, Rubin has stripped his figures of their faces and removed the most overt signs of place-ness that might have more obviously identified his subject. Flowers here sit only in emptiness, rowing boats on lakes of nothing. Japan appears mostly as sparsity, as gesture, as form reduced almost to its element.
​
14th September - 11th November 2023
CASSIUS & Co., London

https://www.cassiusandco.com/gideon-rubin-yoga
I’ll Be Your Mirror
18th April - 9th July 2023
Vortic Curated in partnership with The Courtauld 
 
Practically, mirror’s refractive quality enables artists to paint themselves and explore perspective. Allegorically, the inclusion of a mirror in art can depict an obsession with physical appearance and beauty, warn against vanity, remind us of the transience of life or give rise to inner reflection. 
 
At the centre of the exhibition is one of the most mysterious and compelling works in recent Western art history, Édouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882) alongside twelve artists who reference and utilise the mirror to grapple with complex ideas of identity and the gaze, presence and absence, subject and object, paintings relationship to reality and illusion and more.
 
https://vortic.art/exhibitions/6201
 
Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings & Shadi Al-Atallah 
AWITA x JW Anderson, Curated by Beth Greenacre and Madeleine Martin
6th - 15th July 2022
JW Anderson flagship store Soho, London https://www.awita.london/jwanderson-collaboration-hannah-quinlan-and-rosie-hastings-shadi-al-atallah

The curators brought the duo Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings and Shadi Al-Atallah together for the first time in an installation that responded to JW Anderson as a brand and to the context of Soho. By the 1990’s Soho had established itself as the centre of London's - white, macho - gay scene. Alternatively Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings and Shadi Al-Atallah explore queer communities, politics, histories and aesthetics of queer spaces and identities: via Shadi Al-Atallah’s non-binary mixed-race background, whilst Quinlan and Hastings examine and document the male sex clubs and men-only gay bars to disrupt identity categories and a broader culture of male dominance.

Fair Art Fair Curated II - Womxn
Curated by Beth Greenacre and Jo Baring
6th May - 11th June 2022
Unit 1 Gallery, London
https://unit1gallery-workshop.com/fairartfair-curated-ii-womxn/

The AllBright Club in Maddox Street, London
Curated by Beth Greenacre, opened in 2019
Over 80 female-identifying artists, spanning 60 years of practice, across 5 floors of the AllBright club, Mayfair.
https://www.dezeen.com/2019/05/23/allbright-maddox-street-interiors/
Link to PDF of the AllBright Art Book
https://www.dropbox.com/s/jsjcppzuzag9cbo/ALLBRIGHT%20ART%20BOOK%20edit%20version%202.pdf?dl=0


Beth Greenacre + David Bowie
As curator of the David Bowie collection, David Bowie and Beth Greenacre co-curated numerous exhibitions including: 

BLOC 
County Hall Gallery
10th March - 22nd May 2005, London
Artists exhibited included: Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Raul Ortega Ayala, Doug Fishbone and more. 
https://www.davidbowie.com/2005/2005/02/05/bowieart-and-bloc-present-new-london-exhibition
 
The Window Pane Project
Various sites, launched 2001, London
Long before the word Pop-up was an everyday term David Bowie and Beth Greenacre were taking over disused window spaces across the capital in a series of exhibitions that gave visibility to recent graduates.
Artists exhibited included: Shezad Dawood, Graham Hudson, kr buxey, Luke Oxley, Michael Samuels and many more.
https://www.davidbowie.com/2002/2002/02/03/bowieart-window-pain-project-ii

Meltdown: Sound and Vision 
Royal Festival Hall, June 2002, London
Artists included: Gaia Alessi and Richard Bradbury, kr buxey, Tsai-Wei Chen, Anthony Gross, Daniel Howard-Birt, Graham Hudson, Luke Oxley, Seb Patane, Giles Round and Mathew Sawyer.
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A Tiny New Nation
2003, Spitalfields, London
​Artists exhibited included: Barnaby Hosking, Sam Dargan, Sarah Baker, Damien Roach, Maria von Kholer and more.
Opposite image: Congregation (2025) by Denzil Forrester for SXSW London 2025, installed in Christ Church Spitalfields 
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