21 March - 31 May 2025
For Colorado-based artist Maia Ruth Lee’s first UK solo exhibition beginning on the Spring Equinox, we imagine the gallery as a worldly and spiritual centre. Installations of sculpture, painting, and luggage across our galleries will explore human life in motion.
Read MoreMultidisciplinary artist Priya Mistry (whatsthebigmistry) is collaborating with Primary and its local community on a socially engaged project Mother Tongue: The Kitchen Residency. Together they will explore and evoke Black & Brown joy, focusing on acts of decolonisation, celebration, communing and much more. This is part of a multi-city programme of activity and events.
Read MoreCommissioned by Primary, Santiago Mostyn, a Stockholm-based artist, will present his first solo project in the UK, The Final Letters of Jackie Creft. The hope is to bring forward the legacy of the Grenada Revolution (1979–1983) as a template for imagining how radical forms of pedagogy and political self-determination can manifest in present-day Britain.
Read MoreMonthly cooking sessions to share recipes and increase confidence in cooking skills with Open Arms Organisation and community cooks. We aim to use ingredients found regularly in food parcels, share recipes from different countries and cultures, and support healthy eating.
Read MoreSummer 2024 - Summer 2026
We’re excited to announce the launch of our Community Takeover Programme that opens up Primary’s spaces, offering them to other groups for their activities. In the face of escalating cuts to local communities, this programme will share resources – providing groups with access to space and relevant support for community-led initiatives.
Read More8 November 2024 - 22 February 2025
Kolam is an exhibition, an action, a space, an exploration. Mimicking its namesake, it acts as an invitation to Tamil women, Dalit and other marginalised communities to hold space and have voice within contemporary cultural production. Cross the threshold, Cross that line, defy the mythological man. Erase the kolam.
Read More16 September - 22 September 2024
Supported by indy. powered by the Auction Collective, we will celebrate the end of summer and ten years of Primary’s public programme as we host our first online art auction featuring artworks by artists Hurvin Anderson, Betsy Bradley, Simona Brinkmann, Seán Cummins, Jade de Montserrat, Line Nilsen and Yelena Popova.
Read More8 June - 17 August 2024
The exhibition will initially comprise three existing works by artists Ashley Holmes, Jasleen Kaur, and Jala Wahid before it is transformed. Framed by a series of live events (e.g., readings, performances, screenings or discussions), the artists will return to the artworks presented in the exhibition and withdraw, change or replace them, allowing us to witness better the connections between the works inhabiting Primary.
Read MoreApril - May 2024
The Kitchen Network delves into the politics of food as entertainment, exploring how it's become detached from the realities of its production and its role in climate collapse. Unfolding as the final reality TV food competition on Earth, this performance piece uses humour to examine the divide between online food cultures and their disconnection to wider issues of class, gender, and geography.
Read MoreApril - May 2024
Join us this Spring as Nourishment: a cyclical programme takes over Gallery One for a month – creating space for workshops, meals, events and film screenings. From broken global systems and climate breakdown to localised community responses and projects, this long-term cyclical programme delves into food justice, nourishment, growing and regenerative practices. Nourishment invites artists, activists, cooks, community organisers, gardeners, and local people to come together through a seasonal programme – creating space for imagining and implementing different food systems.
Read More22 July - 23 August 2024
Work in Common is an annual short residency series that encourages artists to experiment with different ways of working – either testing out a speculative idea or developing new collaborations. New Art Exchange Open 2023 prize winner Madi Acharya-Baskerville will undertake a 4-week residency this Summer. Madi works predominantly with pre-existing materials which have been discarded. She has become increasing concerned by the effect of obsolete matter in our environment.
Read MoreMarch - October 2024
Oneiric Kitchen is a collaborative project by Japanese artist-filmmaker Chiemi Shimada and London-based wellbeing practitioner Susie Cunningham. The project explores our relationship with sleep and addresses issues surrounding it. Developed through therapeutic cooking workshops in the UK and Japan and facilitated by project partners Primary (Nottingham) and Documentary Dream Center (Tokyo) the project aims to create a safe space for participants to reflect on their sleep experiences.
Read More1 March - 30 March 2024
Each Begets Each is a collaborative exhibition of new work by Khaya Job and Wingshan Smith. Together, they delve into realms of friendship, myth-making, play, rituals, conversations and sound to weave a tapestry of interconnected experiences. By interrogating and performing archetypes of femininity, the pair engage in the audacious task of imagining a divinity for themselves to create new possibilities for identity and community.
Read More26 January - 17 February 2024
A Material Romance presents new work by Will Harvey with text contribution by Jana Dardouk as part of To & Fro. Will and Jana took the opportunity of connecting to critique the pace of mass consumption by confronting the consequences of its waste and debris. Both artists work within the common ground of art and architecture, their practices seek to challenge our cultural perspectives of ‘waste’.
Read MoreThis Autumn, the Nourishment programme returns, with a focus on food cultures and stories, collective meals as spaces for conversation, and care for people and land as a foundation for healthy food.
Read MoreThe Materials Store provides a space to facilitate material reuse, reducing the disposal of materials after their initial use has expired. Designed by Primary residents Will Harvey and Jacob Kelly, the structure aims to employ circular economic thinking as a model that is restorative and regenerative by design, through shifting perspectives on waste thus reducing pollution by keeping products and materials in use.
Read More8 July - 2 September 2023
The Unicorn is Killed and Brought to the Castle Cartoon is an installation of large-scale figurative collage by artist Sam Keogh. These intricate works on paper draw heavily from The Hunt of the Unicorn, a series of seven tapestries made in Flanders at the turn of the 16th century and now housed in The Met Cloisters, New York.
8 - 29 July 2023
As part of Primary’s reopening season, we will host a ‘Residents Series’, a programme of events and activity showcasing and platforming work by Primary’s resident and member community which includes over 60 artists, makers, musicians, curators, and creatives at all stages in their careers, working across all media.
Launching 23 August 2023
After two years of regular creative play sessions, Build Create Play has developed to create a public artwork for the new playground. The artwork is being designed by artist Ismail Khokon through a series of creative workshops with local children – exploring what play means to them and the materials, shapes and colours that spark their imaginations.
28 August - 24 September 2023
Work in Common is a series of short residencies that encourage artists to experiment with different ways of working – either testing out a speculative idea or developing new collaborations. Each artist will use the spaces at Primary to produce and present work to the public, through screenings, rehearsals, performances, workshops, and meals.
