Commissioned 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 More21 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 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.
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.
7 October - 9 December 2023
A new multi-media installation featuring two experimental films. THE WALL is a surreal and absurdist take on housing inequality and its psychological effects. Hyperopia is a psychedelic two channel video installation which uses script, disorientating film and editing techniques.
26 January - 30 March 2024
Sonya Dyer’s work intertwines speculative fiction, hard science and mythologies to propose new ways of conceiving where the centre is located in fictional narratives of the future. In this project, hard science meets science fiction, with the Ready Room providing space for cells to relax, strategize and entertain. Recalling HeLa’s dubious genesis, the exhibition contemplates alternate forms of building society – what if the HeLa cells have found a better way to live? HeLa cells were originally taken from the body of Henrietta Lacks, a young Black mother in the USA, and were the first human materials sent into space in 1960.
Landedness is a commissioning, co-creation, and engagement programme running throughout 2022, that explores topics such as land access, custodianship, and intimacy. Through the programme Zethu Maseko has developed a large-scale quilted banner created from natural dyes.
Read More16 September-26 November 2022
Attention, Absorption is British Guyanese artist Maybelle Peters' most comprehensive exhibition of work in the UK to date. The show leads on from the When We Worked at Raleigh (WWWAR) project and oral archive between 2020 and 2021 which was delivered in partnership with Nottingham Black Archive.
Mummy Hood Nesting Forest is a site to get lost: a forest, a URL, and a new work of fiction by artist David Steans. The commission takes the form of a multipart story hosted online in its entirety via a bespoke website. A macabre story about storytelling, preparedness, and packable techwear, Mummy Hood Nesting Forest uses the provisional scenario of a hiker getting lost in the woods to conjure, recur, rewrite, and exhume.
Read MoreLand Lay Moldbrest is a three-part audiobook written by following packhorse trails in Lancashire, Greater Manchester and West Yorkshire. Roy Claire Potter works between performance and experimental art writing with recent works facilitated by Counterflows music festival in Glasgow, Reduced Listening for BBC Radio 3, and Tate Britain with Tate Publishing.
Read MoreEjaradini is an art installation and garden created by South African artist collaborative MADEYOULOOK (Molemo Moiloa and Nare Mokgotho). The exhibition features archival images, plants, and text on the façade of Primary. Ejaradini reflects on Black urban gardening, land, and plant life in South Africa and Britain through visual and nature-based storytelling.
April - September 2022
Read MoreBuilding on When We Worked At Raleigh, we are pleased to announce that artist Maybelle Peters has been commissioned for a period of research and development, working towards the creation of a new moving image artwork in response to the archive.
February - May 2021
Read MoreThe first instalment of a new and evolving work of performance, audio-visual installation, and experimental text, dealing poetically with urgent themes around finance, housing, the body, the voice, and the porous nature of selfhood.
May - July 2021
Read MoreIf lockdown was a rhythm, what would it be? A group of local young people aged 16-25 will produce a podcast or radio show focused on stories, thoughts, and reflections about the lockdown, led by digital storyteller Jaya Gordon-Moore and creative practitioner Parmjit Sagoo.
September - October 2020
Read MoreA new video installation developed through collaboration and discussion with UK-based immigrants, exploring the entanglement of love, power, and administration.
October 2019 - January 2020
Read MoreThree new commissions by Kobby Adi, Celia-Yunior, and Suzanne van der Lingen, curated by Emily Gray, responding to the history of New Contemporaries and exploring the transition of the artist from education to professional.
November 2019
Read MoreCommissioned by New Art Exchange and supported by Primary, Does Anybody Leave Heaven? by Ibrahim Ahmed is a commentary on the mythology of the US as a place of desire and opportunity, particularly amongst young men living in Cairo who are unable to travel outside of Egypt.
September - October 2019
Read MoreA public artwork, created by Bahbak Hashemi-Nezhad in collaboration with local residents, responding to the question 'What is Lentonness?' at a time when the neighbourhood has undergone significant changes.
April - September 2019
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