Current

SUMMER–AUTUMN 2024

Beaconsfield’s commission salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears by Nastja Säde Rönkkö opens at Serlachius Museums on 7 September 2024 as part of the Below Zero Finnish Art Award.

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Beaconsfield is one of London’s longest established artist run spaces – now in its 29th year. As an independent artist initiative and registered charity, and with no fixed state funding, we need to raise 100% of our income from a variety of sources – individuals and companies, as well as from public funding bodies, trusts and foundations. Please support our programme.

recent projects

PAST PRESENT. Fragments of memory. Bucharest-Pompeii-London

Exhibition: 22 July – 12 August 2023

Exploring the recuperation of cultural memory, Ioana Marinescu’s project works with the destruction of ancient Pompeii caused by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD, alongside events in 1980s Bucharest, when a historic residential quarter of the city was razed to make way for Ceaușescu’s Palace of the Parliament or ‘People’s Palace’.

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news and events

Beaconsfield, The Finnish Institute in the UK and Ireland and Serlachius are pleased to announce Anssi Kasitonni as the winner of  the Below Zero Finnish Art Award 2025.
Pauli Sivonen of Serlachius comments: ‘This will only be Anssi’s second solo exhibition abroad. He is held in affection by the Finns since his artworks  speak very directly to the Finnish sensibility. It will be exciting to see how this artist responds to the London context and how the work translates’.

Read more here PRESS RELEASE

PAST PRESENT
Ioana Marinescu
BREAKING NEWS 20 MAY 2024 – PAST PRESENT wins AFCN AWARD for ‘Promoting Romanian culture in the world’ at the AFCN Gala at the National Theatre in Bucharest.
PAST PRESENT is a moving archive; a research project in motion, gathering history and evolving at each stage of its development. Its components include photographs, the written word, the spoken word, videography, soundscape, living bodies and dance choreography. PAST PRESENT is commissioned by Beaconsfield and co-produced with PETEC Bucharest.
MEMORIES OF THE FIVE ADMINISTRATIONS
Simon Bedwell, Stephen Sutcliffe

Exhibition: 15 May – 6 July (Wednesday – Saturday, 12-5pm)

British artists Simon Bedwell and Stephen Sutcliffe collaborate in an exhibition of new ceramics, video and painting. Bedwell’s new ceramics portray mainstream political figures from the last decade as slugs, inspired by satirists James Gillray and Steve Bell. These amorphous forms become the support for video works by Sutcliffe, which draw on an extensive archive of British television, film sound, broadcast images and spoken word recordings.

CELEBRATING BLACK HISTORY MONTH 2023
EARTH-READING WITH PHOEBE COLLINGS-JAMES
24 October 6-8pm
Beaconsfield’s Environmental Artist in Residence Phoebe Collings-James leads the second in a series of reading groups.

SONIC REFLECTIONS ON WINDRUSH WITH DUBMORPHOLOGY
26 October 7.30-11pm
Black Industrial Sound artists Trevor Mathison and Gary Stewart AKA Dubmorphology return to Beaconsfield for Black History Month to weave black histories into a specially commissioned electro-acoustic sound performance.

 

salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears
Nastja Säde Rönkkö

Residency: 23 January – 15 March, Exhibition: 16 March – 6 May 

The third recipient of the Below Zero Finnish Art Prize, investigates relationships between the digital era, power, humanity and the future of our planet. For this commission she will develop three new moving image works on site, produced with Beaconsfield under the working title salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears.

BEACONSFIELD AND THE WILD ESCAPE
Beaconsfield is part of The Wild Escape, a major new project uniting hundreds of museums and galleries with schools and families to connect to the natural world in their local habitats. We will be working with local families and school children, ceramic artist Phoebe Collings-James and Rachael Nilssen of Mud Gang Pottery Studio, to contribute to re-wilding Kennington/Vauxhall while thinking about the role that earth or clay plays in our ecologies. These themes will be expanded in a public talk with Professor Kathryn Yusoff, author of A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (2019).

LUCY GREGORY WINS BLOOMING LAMBETH AWARD 2022 FOR BEACONSFIELD’S GARDEN-YARD
Congratulations to our brilliant horticulturalist Lucy Gregory, who won a Blooming Lambeth Award for Beaconsfield’s Garden-yard! Her ‘Best in Bloom’ 2022 award was presented in Lambeth Town Hall at a prizegiving event hosted by Arit Anderson, from BBC’s Gardeners’ World, and Incredible Edible Lambeth.

SYSTEMIC PERIPHERALISM
Mark Fell
8 October – 3 December 2022
Responding to Beaconsfield’s main gallery spaces, two new sonic installations mark a cautious return to public life, asking visitors to collectively engage in sensory exploration.

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