Bold Tendencies

Déjà vu, the uncanny yet familiar sensation, haunts the vanishing point of consciousness. In it we surrender to an other-worldly incursion of the spectral, eerie and surreal—a rush of recognition engulfed by dark swells of memory. Objects appear to us as rare, places become strange, meetings sudden; the happenstance, all but fate. Déjà vu ripples from fractures in the waking mind to the great chasms of our collective unconscious, twisting through contrasting and conflicting worlds of psychology, neuroscience and folk superstition. A world of estrangement in which, as Henri Bergson notes, “We feel that we choose and will, but that we are choosing what is imposed on us and willing the inevitable.”

Spontaneous and arresting, déjà vu elicits a deeper, more compulsive sense of the real and our place within it—one in which memory, illusion and enigma are irrevocably entwined. Time becomes looped. Memories soften. Doubles and doppelgängers abound. A moment of mystery and intimation is felt with the intensity of divine intervention: a reflection of monotonous digital ennui, of fantastical, fractious dreamscapes or the tantalising ache of a future just out of reach. Déjà vu lurks in the shadows of anonymous stone circles and stares at us from the bewildered eyes of an amnesiac; pulses through the cosmic veins of deep time and cries for the failed optimism of abandoned modernist ruins, our eternal return through tragedy and farce. 

In its grasp reality is untethered—if only for an instant—from what Max Ernst would call our ‘virtue of censorship’: the shackles of linear time, the guard of human agency and the guarantees of a shared, nostalgic past. Engulfing us in a foreign terrain of rhythms, pulsions and patterinings beyond our knowing, déjà vu offers us not only a glimpse of but access to spaces beyond the limits of consciousness and anodyne everyday experience. Providing opportunities to explore the contested, compelling blank space of what lies in-between, déjà vu is the echo of a song that lingers long after the last note has faded. 

The needle has skipped the groove of the present. Speaking to a world of long-forgotten dreams, untold stories and future premonitions, Bold Tendencies will gather its 2025 programme under this broad and enigmatic theme. It will explore the dark, surreal and compulsive; the illusory, absurd and superstitious; the fantastical, otherworldly and more-than-human, asking how the uncanny principles of déjà vu resonate with us today. And in times of uncertainty and scepticism, how an experience of its world might offer moments important to us in ways not yet clear or binding, but filled with the ungovernable yet promissory optimism of what will have been. 

We celebrate the liberated humanity of 13th century Persian poet Rumi with distinguished translator Haleh Liza Gafori, and revisit the wartime broadcasts of resistance and hope transmitted by Thomas Mann (on the occasion of his 150th birthday).

We mark two major figures in the world of hip-hop with evenings dedicated to J Dilla Donuts and MF DOOM Operation Doomsday, and reconstruct the record collections of Edward Saïd and Susan Sontag, new entries to our Listening Room in the Straw Auditorium. Fitzcarraldo Editions return for their Annual Summer Party with readings by Oluwaseun Olayiwola, Jen Calleja and Ariel Saramandi. 

Looking back to look forward, the rich sonic world of JS Bach is brought to life via Back2Bach, celebrating the Baroque master’s still-iconic music played on solo cello, harpsichord, synthesiser, organ and keyboard, with soloists Sheku Kanneh-Mason, Sæunn Thorsteindottír, James McVinnie, Jean Rondeau, Hugh Rowlands, Eliza McCarthy and Siwan Rhys.

These events brings to the car park a pipe organ designed after the great organ of 1711 at Freiburg Cathedral, and the Moog Sound Lab, centered around one of the rarest electronic instruments, the limited edition reissue of the 1967 System 55 Moog Synthesizer, as we honour the legendary work of synthesiser pioneer Wendy Carlos. 

The theme of succession continues with the performance of Rachmaninoff’s four Piano Concertos in a single evening – a UK first. Spanning 50 years of the composer’s 69 year life – each of them written and subsequently much revisited, revised and reworked – the Concertos arrived in a period of seismic change across socio-political and cultural life, and their sound worlds represent this in shimmering technicolour and contrasting moods of melancholy, grotesquerie, nostalgia and exultation.

Joining us are award-winning pianists Ryan Wang, Jeneba Kanneh-Mason, Boris Giltburg and Junyan Chen, and the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Charlotte Corderoy, with exceptional support from Steinway, Rachmaninoff’s favourite piano maker.

Emii Alrai (b. 1993, Blackpool, UK. Lives and works in Leeds, UK) is an artist and trained museum registrar whose work spans material investigation in relation to memory, critique of the western museological structure and the complexity of ruins. Working primarily in sculpture and installation, her work operates as large-scale realms built in relation to bodies of research which concern archaeology and the natural environments objects are excavated from.

Weaving oral histories, inherited nostalgia and the details of language to question the rigidity of Empire and the power of hierarchy, her work interrogates the static presence of history. Clay vessels, gypsum forms and steel armatures punctuate the labyrinth-like spaces Alrai creates, mimicking museum dioramas and romanticised visions of the past.

Alrai graduated from her MA Art Gallery and Museum Studies at the University of Leeds in 2018, having previously completed her BA Fine Art at the same university in 2016, studying for a year at École Supérieure d’art et de design Marseille-Méditerranée in 2015. Solo presentations include with Maximillian William, London, UK (2024); Quench Gallery, Margate, UK (2024); Eastside Projects, Birmingham, UK (2022); Jerwood Arts, London, UK (2021); and The Tetley, Leeds, UK (2020).

In 2025 she was commissioned for a solo presentation at Compton Verney, a historic manor in the county of Warwickshire, UK. In 2023 she was commissioned for Into Nature Biennial at Bargerveen, Nature Reserve in the Netherlands, and in 2022 received the Future Collect Commission from The Hepworth Wakefield & iniva. In 2023 Alrai was recipient of the Galleries of Ontario Award for Exhibition of the Year and was shortlisted for the Frieze Artist Award, and in 2022 was recipient of a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award.

Alrai has completed residencies at Wysing Arts Centre Residency, Cambridge, UK (2024); Villa Medici: The French Academy in Rome, IT (2023); Launchpad LaB Spring Residency, La Boissière, FR (2023); In-ruins Residency, Calabria, IT (2021) and Triangle Astérides Residency, Marseille, FR (2021). Alrai’s work is held in public collections including the British Museum, London; Leeds Art Gallery, Leeds; the Arts Council Collection, London; the Government Art Collection, and The Hepworth Wakefield.

Mac Collins (b. 1995, Nottingham, UK. Lives and works in Nottingham and Newcastle, UK) creates allegorical objects, sculpture and installation from resistant materials such as wood, welded steel, cast aluminium and cast glass. Having entered the field of contemporary visual arts with a design education, Collins approaches the creation of sculpture with an interest in materiality, tactility and spatial understanding.

Collins follows a human-centred approach that responds to the social rituals and behaviours he encounters. Drawn from a wide range of sources – from domestic objects to oral histories, Jamaican dominoes culture to common psychological phenomena – Collin’s work explores notions of distorted memory and contemporary mythology.

Collins graduated from his BA 3D Design at Northumbria University in 2018. Recent presentations of his work include at Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, US (2024); Denver Art Museum, Denver, US (2024); Strada Gallery, New York, US (2024); Carl Freedman Gallery, Margate, UK (2023); Side Gallery, Barcelona, ES (2023), Primary, Nottingham, UK (2022); and V&A Museum, London, UK (2022). His work is held in public collections including V&A Museum, London, UK; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, US; Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein, DE; and Denver Museum of Art, Denver, US.

In 2023 Collins was commissioned to represent the British Pavillion at La Biennale Architettura in Venice, and in 2022 he was commissioned for The Harewood House Biennial in Leeds. Collins is the recipient of the Emerging Design Medal by the London Design Festival 2021 and the Ralph Saltzman Prize for the Emerging Designer of the Year 2022, which culminated in a solo exhibition that year at the London Design Museum. Alongside the physical side of his practice, Collins engages in other academic and cultural pursuits including writing, public talks, and lecturing. He currently holds the position of Lecturer at Northumbria University.

Richard Dean Hughes (b. 1987, Chester, UK. Lives and works in Manchester, UK) is an artist exploring the fragile and increasingly frustrated relationship between modernity, nature, tradition and history. Working in an array of materials including resin, glass, metal, plaster, dust and newspaper, Hughes incorporates traditional processes alongside new technologies, such as hand-carving and industrial fabrication, heat-pressed imagery and digital stereo-lithography.

Central to his work is the relationship between reality and illusion, object and image, temporality and the uncanny, a series of juxtapositions and affects coming together in often large-scale, manipulated trompe l’oeil sculptures. Existing in what he describes as ‘the realm of the hypothetical’, Hughes’ work evokes feelings of regression, inertia and virtuality alongside those of security, comfort and desire.

Hughes graduated from his BA Sculpture at Manchester School of Art in 2009. Recent solo presentations of his work include Richard Dean Hughes, Xxijra Hii, London, UK (2025); Spherical Sadness, Piccalilli Gallery, London, UK (2024); Twelve Thousand, with Nicola Ellis, Arena Gallery, Manchester, UK (2024); Everything at Once, with Amba Sayal Benett, Generation and Display, London (2022); Subliminal Thaw, Night Time Story, Los Angeles, US (2021); and Vent, 9A Gallery, Todmorden, UK (2021). In 2015 Hughes was shortlisted for the XerXes Sculpture Prize at Serpentine Galleries, London.

Recent group exhibitions include And the Safe Spots Become Impassable, Ethan Yip / Yisi Li, Hong Kong, CN (2024); A Mirror to Vanity, Brooke Bennington, London, UK (2024); ​This be the Verse, Xxijra Hii, London, UK (2023); ​Things Falls Apart, the Centre Cannot Hold, Tabula Rasa Gallery, London, UK (2023); ​Ubiquitous no.14, Tube Gallery, Palma, ES (2023); ​Centre of the Periphery, Pipeline Gallery, London, UK (2023); ​Off Trail, Air Gallery, Manchester, UK (2021); Soft Display, Division Of Labour, Worcester, U (2021); ​When Shit Hits The Fan, Guts Gallery, London, UK (2020); When Space Sits Still, A Better Feeling’ Paris, FR (2020); and ​Millenialism, Paradise Works, Manchester, UK (2019).

Idris Khan OBE (b. 1978, Birmingham, UK. Lives and works in London, UK)’s acclaimed practice uses a range of media – from photography to sculpture, painting and moving-image – to explore the intersections of time, memory and the layering of personal and collective experience. Khan’s minimalist, often sublime work is known for a continuous interplay of creation, repetition and erasure, drawing from a wealth of sources including religious and theological texts, the history of art and classical music.

Gaining prominence for his large-scale composite images that superimpose and obscure layers of source material, such as scores by Frédéric Chopin, pages of the Qur’an or postcards of J.M.W. Turner paintings, Khan’s creates contemporary palimpsests that both animate and question principles of cultural inheritance, media saturation, essence and identity. Khan’s abstract, expansive practice has more recently included shot-blast steel and printed glass to further evoke the tension between image and language, addressing contemporary themes of conflict, memorial and remembrance.

Idris Khan OBE studied photography at the University of Derby and completed his MA Fine Art at the Royal College of Art in London in 2004. In 2016, Khan was commissioned to make a permanent public monument, forming the centrepiece of the new Memorial Park in Abu Dhabi, which was unveiled on the UAE Commemoration Day. In 2017, it received an American Architecture Prize, a World Architecture News Award and a German Design Award. Khan was appointed OBE for services to Art in the Queen’s Birthday 2017 Honours List. A major public sculpture for London by Khan, commissioned by St George’s Place with London Borough of Southwark as part of the development of One Blackfriars, was unveiled in autumn 2019. In 2023 Khan participated in the Islamic Arts Biennale, Saudi Arabia.

Khan’s first career survey exhibition in the United States, Idris Khan: Repeat After Me, was held at the Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin, USA, in 2024. Following major solo presentations at national and international institutions including the British Museum, London, UK (2018); Whitworth Gallery, University of Manchester, UK (2016–2017 and 2012); Gothenburg Konsthall, Sweden (2011); Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto, CA (2010); Kunsthaus Murz, Mürzzuschlag, AT (2010) and K20, Düsseldorf, DE (2008). Khan’s work is held in public collections around the world including the British Museum, London, UK; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, FR; Musée National des Beaux Arts, Québec, CA; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, US; Philadelphia Museum of Art, US; de Young Museum, San Francisco, US; and Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, AU.

Khan has also worked on significant collaborations across art forms. In 2014 he worked with choreographer Wayne McGregor and composer Max Richter on Richter’s recomposition of The Four Seasons, producing sets for the production which premiered at Zurich Opera House. Lying in Wait, 2009, a collaboration by Khan and choreographer Sarah Warsop in association with Victoria Miro and Siobhan Davies Dance, is formed of layered movement that travels between three screens.

Raheel Khan (b. 1992, Nottingham, UK. Lives and works in London, UK) is an artist and composer exploring the interstices of sound, text, installation and performance. Originally a student of Economics, Khan has moved towards an artistic practice that considers the collage and collision between expanded assemblages and embodied sound. His research observes and interrogates the tensions between belief systems, material cultures and social phenomena, often displayed through a compositional framework he describes as machine noise, devotional loops and the acoustic pressure.

Khan’s compositions reference both avant-garde and pop aesthetics – comprising field recordings, synthetic textures and piano, choral works, woodwind and string instruments – speaking both to personal memory and collective consciousness. His research explores the cyclical nature of time and promise, loss and formation of language, religious mysticism and contemporary suburbia.

Khan graduated from his MA Fine Art from Goldsmiths College in 2024, supported by both Lisson Gallery and Aziz Foundation Scholarships, having previously completed his BA Economics from Manchester Metropolitan Business School in 2015. For his MFA presentation Khan was awarded the Almacantar Studio Residency and Goldsmiths Wardens Award. He is currently a Graduate Fellow at Goldsmiths College and shortlisted for the 2025 Arts Foundation Future Award. Khan will participate in the New Art Exchange Residency in Nottingham in 2025, as well as the Somerset House Studios Assembly Residency Programme.

Recent presentation of his work include with Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, UK (2025); Lisson Gallery and Bomb Factory Art Foundation, London, UK (2024); Palmer Gallery, London, UK (2024); Longsight Community Art Space, Manchester, UK (2024); Deptford X, London, UK (2023); Ovada Gallery, Oxford, UK (2023); Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester, UK (2022); Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, Edinburgh, UK (2022); and FACT, Liverpool, UK (2021).

Khan has performed, broadcast and engaged with talks and workshops a number of institutions including South London Gallery, London, UK (2024); University of Bergen, Norway, NO (2024); Audiograft Festival, Oxford, UK (2023); Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (2022); Tramway Gallery, Glasgow, UK (2021); and Manchester International Festival, Manchester, UK (2021).

For over 20 years Gillian Wearing CBE (b. 1963, Birmingham, UK. Lives and works in London, UK) has been a leading figure in British contemporary art. Known for her unflinching approach to photography and video, amongst many other mediums, her conceptually driven work records the power dynamics and voyeurism present in everyday life.

Employing prosthetic masks and props, voice dubbing and altered imagery, her wide-ranging oeuvre, featuring self-portraiture, individuals and groups, explores the boundaries between public and private life, individuals and society, voyeurism and exhibitionism, fiction and fact. Informed by candid street photography and the confessional culture of late-twentieth-century television talk shows, the tensions of social status and class politics, family relations and the ways in which individuals distinguish themselves within a crowd, she has described her practice as a form of ‘editing life’, one which questions deep-rooted notions of reality, authenticity and fantasy.

Wearing is a British conceptual artist, one of the Young British Artists, and winner of the 1997 Turner Prize. She studied in London at Chelsea College of Art 1985–87 and Goldsmiths College 1987–90, and in 2007 was elected as a lifetime member of the Royal Academy of Arts. In 2018 a bronze statue by Wearing, commemorating the life of the suffragist Millicent Fawcett, was erected in Parliament Square, London – its first monument to a woman. In 2019 Wearing was awarded a CBE for contribution to the arts.

Wearing has earned international recognition throughout her career, with retrospectives held at the Serpentine Galleries in London in 2000, and Whitechapel Gallery in 2012, later touring to Düsseldorf and Munich. In 2017, the National Portrait Gallery held the acclaimed exhibition Gillian Wearing and Claude Cahun: Behind the Mask, and in 2021, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City opened a major retrospective of the artist’s work, Gillian Wearing: Wearing Masks.

Wearing’s works are held in significant public collections across the world, including MoMA New York, Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, Tate Modern, Hamburger Kunsthalle, the British Council Collection, the Hammer Museum, the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., among others.