MANIFESTO FOR SUSTAINABLE EXPERIMENTATION

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. A new generation of artists further expands the dialogue.

Emily Mulenga weaves pop soundtracks, while Ellis Parkinson’s interventions revisit colonial legacies and Luana Duvoisin Zanchi explores laughter as a form of resistance Roving artist reporters Michael Curran and Simon Tyszko will document the entire unfolding “exhillation”1 via video and radio, making the exhibition as much process as product.

An international screening programme, curated by queer and ecofeminist artist A.L. Steiner, extends the exhibition's reach across time zones and cultural borders. Kang Seung Lee’s archival reconstructions stand alongside works focusing on environmental and LBTQIA2S+ issues, by US artists Kym McDaniel, Amina Ross, Yo E Ryou, Shahana Rajani, Jill Cassid and Sasha Wortzel, forming a digital transatlantic bridge between non-binary, feminist, and environmental resistance.

Other featured artists and curators will include Tamsyn Challenger and Colin Herd, Jules Clarke, Fran Painter-Flemming, Anne Robinson and The Charmers, Luke Turner, Joseph Walsh and Plastique Fantastique (David Burrows, Simon O'Sullivan, Anna Benlloch, Katrina Palmer, Christine Kirubi, Benedict Drew, Frankie Roberts, John Walter, Zhuyang Liu et al), delivering performances, workshops and tarot readings.

Manifesto for Sustainable Experimentation is more than a retrospective. It is a dynamic, durational exploration of how identity is constructed through class, gender, and cultural memory – and a rallying call to recognise ‘environment’ not only as physical landscape, but as the social and political ecosystems we inhabit and shape.