The Shock of the Now - Issue #190
Afternoon All - Welcome to Issue 190 of The Shock of the Now! I hope you’re having an enjoyable week.
This week, the full issue includes 15 Recommended Exhibitions, as well as 15 fresh Artist Opportunities.
I hope you enjoy Issue 190, and if so do forward it along! As always, questions and comments are welcome, so feel free to get in touch, H x
Recommended Exhibitions Opening This Week :
Maya Gurung-Russell Campbell - ‘I Want To Be Ready’ Solo Exhibition - Incubator, Marylebone (10th September - 5th October, opening Wednesday 10th September, 5:30-7:30pm)
Incubator presents Maya Gurung-Russell Campbell’s solo exhibition ‘I Want To Be Ready’.
“Maya Gurung-Russell Campbell's solo exhibition, I Want to Be Ready, transforms Incubator into a site of quiet resistance, a space where the artist negotiates constraint through the elemental act of knotting. Working with deconstructed Union Jack and St George's flags alongside rope, cotton, jute fibre and an array of military surplus materials, Campbell transforms symbols of national authority into suspended networks of tension and release, each double knot a meditation on what it means to prepare oneself for an uncertain world.
The exhibition's title, borrowed from Danielle Goldman's study of improvised dance, positions readiness not as anticipation of a known future, but as a practice of staying present within constraint.” - Incubator
Kavitha Balasingham - ‘Love Island’ Solo Exhibition - Alice Black, Fitzrovia (11th September - 18th October, opening Wednesday 10th September, 6-8pm)
Alice Black presents Kavitha Balasingham’s debut solo exhibition ‘Love Island’.
“Kavitha explores the absurdity and tenderness of communication across time and space - through cartoon physics, science fiction, and everyday digital exchanges. Her works draw on ideas like spaghettification through black holes to imagine what it means to send a feeling, memory, or emoji across generations. Objects pass through portals and emerge transformed: stretched, melted, misread, or quietly haunting.
Love Island transports visitors into a portal - one that slips between the personal and the political, between paradise and uncertainty. It began with a 2024 research trip to Sri Lanka, where collaborations and new connections seeded a body of works exploring the materiality of telecommunication, diaspora, and the strange intimacy of a place once imagined but unknown - unfolding
through textiles, ceramics, sound, and sculpture.” - Alice Black
Stuart Brisley - Solo Exhibition - Lungley, Fitzrovia (10th September - 25th October, opening Wednesday 10th September, 6-8pm)
Lungley presents a solo exhibition by Stuart Brisley.
“Lungley Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Stuart Brisley (born 1933). At age 92 he lives and continues to work in Dungeness. For his third solo exhibition at the gallery we are proud to present a selection of works spanning a period of 65 years from the 1960’s to the present day.” - Lungley
“I have spent a year’s speculative involvement concerning what I term as certainties. The Xray of The Intrigue itself which was scanned well after the artist’s death in 1940 as a subject follows that this selected Xray is what has been considered. The attraction to the idea of a photographic image of an internal body revealing the artwork proved to be a difficult prospect; one which took some time and close attention.It is only latterly in the last month or so that working through the Xray became an intermittent pleasure. It comes as an archeological interpretation.” - Stuart Brisley, Dungeness, July 2025
Auriea Harvey - ‘(This Room is a Sculpture Called) PROPHECY’ Solo Exhibition - arebyte's Digital Art Centre, Camden (12th September - 21st December, opening Thursday 11th September, 6:30-9pm)
arebyte inagurates their new Digital Art Centre in Camden w. Auriea Harvey’s debut UK solo exhibition ‘(This Room is a Sculpture Called) PROPHECY’, curated by Pita Arreola.
“(This Room is a Sculpture Called) PROPHECY is a body of newly commissioned work by pioneering multi-media artist Auriea Harvey. Curated by Pita Arreola, the exhibition marks the launch of arebyte's Digital Art Centre, a new home for the organisation’s art programme and a hub of artist studios and creative workspaces in the heart of Camden.
Harvey’s first solo exhibition in the UK, PROPHECY is an allegorical rendering of a spiritual journey, charting a course to reclaim grace and unity amid a landscape of disconnection and collective suffering. At its core lies a deep yearning for empathy amongst fractured societies.” - arebyte
Adham Faramawy - ‘The earth laughs in flowers’ Solo Exhibition - Niru Ratnam, Fitzrovia (12th September - 25th October, opening Thursday 11th September, 6-8pm)
Niru Ratnam presents Adham Faramawy’s solo exhibition ‘The earth laughs in flowers’.
“Adam Faramawy's solo exhibition ‘The earth laughs in flowers’ builds on the artist’s recent institutional exhibitions at Chapter, Cardiff and Focal Point Gallery, Southend, where they investigated how landscapes such as rivers, weeds and waterways can become sites of resistance and belonging. Featuring two recent film works, Birds of Sorrow and Daughters of the River, alongside a new series of paintings and a sculptural work, the exhibition segues between the personal and the poetic and wider themes of identity, migration and belonging. Faramawy’s family history is interwoven with mythological references, metaphor and historical references, locating the subjective as always enmeshed within the world, histories and stories around us.” - Niru Ratnam