The Archive of Small Things is a group exhibition bringing together small-scale artworks, objects and fragments that offer glimpses into the world we inhabit.
Taking place near the British Museum, the exhibition considers how objects become significant, how materials hold memories, and how the things we make, use and keep might one day tell a story about us.
We invite artists to contribute to a collection of contemporary artefacts, works that might be encountered as fragments of a lost world, records of everyday life, personal relics or objects yet to be understood.
The works need not resemble historical artefacts. We are interested in the unexpected, the familiar, the imagined and the overlooked; in objects that carry a story beyond themselves, and in works that invite us to look a little closer.
Deadline 14th October
Apply Here
Partner Event for London Design Festival 2026
12th - 20th Septmeber
The Annex - 1 Tiverton Street, Elephant & Castle, London SE1 6NT
https://londondesignfestival.com/activities/known-terrain
Exploring how places, systems and relationships become familiar over time. Rather than a fixed condition, familiarity is understood as something continually shaped through movement, repetition and exchange. Works examine shifting perspectives, everyday encounters and landscapes around us.
Show 1: Structures of Place, Memory and Transformation
Dates: 12th -15th Sep
The first show explores how architecture, infrastructure and landscapes become familiar through movement, repetition, reuse and exchange. Bringing together works that engage with place as an evolving condition, the exhibition considers how memory, material traces and everyday encounters shape our understanding of the environments we inhabit, and how these places transform over time.
Exhibiting artists:
Abbie McKelvie, Anna Sergiel, Ana Vigil Escalera, Batool Zehra, Danlu Zheng, Devansh Soni, Engin Demir, Haibo Jia, Kaiyuan Yang, Kengo Horikoshi, Lezhi (Crystal) Zhang, Lifeng Liao, Loren Herring, Mabel Nash, Mandy (Fangning) Liu, Michelle Widjaja, Muchuan Chen, Qun Fu, Jiemin Ren, Rong Lin, Shijia Huang, Yu Ai, Veronika Russakova, Wanqi Zhu, Xintong Dong, Xinyun He. XinYue Ma & Alexander Collinson, Xiuzhuo Zhou, Xiyu Wang, Zeyuan Ren, Zhenghan Huang.
Show 2: Systems of Self, Ritual and Becoming
Dates: 17th -20th Sep
The second show explores how identities, rituals and cultural systems are shaped through encounters with technology, AI and emerging futures. The exhibition considers the self as fluid and continually constructed, examining how new technologies, inherited rituals and shifting cultural frameworks transform how we understand ourselves, one another and the worlds we inhabit.
Exhibiting artists:
Anshika Gauri Agrawal, Binciya Hamza, Susanna Steuerman Kinston, Minjeong Kim & Charlotte Yang, Charles Kenyon Vaughan, Charles Lambert, Diego Cebrián, Finka(Yunlong Jue), Jingxuan Yang, Joshua Roberts, Klaudia Pacharew, Lucy Sabin, Mengnan (Mona) Gao, Mengmeng Zeng, Monica Dhaka, Nomi Wang, Quiet Matter, Riichiro Yamamoto, Ruby Eve Hall, Runhua Liu, Seokyung Jeong, Timothy Yufit, Yagmur Karaman, Yanxiao Liu, Xueqing Liang.
3rd - 12th September 2026
Gallery 19A - 19a Hollingdean Terrace, Brighton and Hove, Brighton BN1 7HB
Drift Work brings together emerging artists whose practices explore the shifting ecologies of coastal environments through material, memory, and transformation.
Taking the shoreline as a place where natural processes and human histories converge, the exhibition invites responses to marine and coastal life, erosion, tidal movement, salvage, wreckage, and the objects the sea returns. From thriving ecosystems and changing habitats to rusted structures, washed ashore debris, and traces of industry, Drift Work considers the coast as a living archive, shaped by weather, time, and continual exchange.
Exhibiting Artists:
Andrew Stratford, Anna Franklin, Ann Russell, Beatrice Markopoulos, Catherine Whiteoak, David Ian Bickley & Hina Kahn, Devansh Soni, Francesca Silverton, Gen Doy, Imogen Campbell, Jack Sanders, James Lord, Kate Tulett, Kevin Goodwin, Laurie Jeanne, Lena Zinski, Rebecca Mwanja, Richard Willis, Ruby O'Sullivan, Titus Davies, XINGCHEN Guo, Yuliana Mulvany, XinYue Ma & Alexander Collinson.
HIT & RUN is a one-day exhibition built around movement, momentum, and temporary takeover. Across three consecutive days, the space will completely transform each day. Artists arrive in the morning, install work in the space, exhibit throughout the day, meet audiences and other artists during an evening viewing, then deinstall the same night.
HIT & RUN leans into the energy of the temporary pop up culture: A show that appears quickly, takes over, and disappears again. An encounter that only exists if you were there for it.
Show One exhibiting artists:
Abigail Alvarez, Ashling McCann, Freja Jiahui Ye, Iris Isabella, Joyce Aranuwa, Julien Le Pocher, Kimberley Aurow, Laura James, Mark G Lonsdale, Maya May Jex, Miranda Reula, Naomi Mellor, Nazanin Ghahramani, Rishi Khurana, Robert R Redman, Vika Malysheva, Zhenghan Huang.
Show Two exhibiting artists:
Alessia Sissa, Bilge Imamoglu, Binciya Hamza, Claudia Pang, George Stamenov, Harsh Pratap Singh Bist, Haoyu Li, Jeongyun (Jennie) Kwak, Jiayin Lu, Kuan Yu Chou, Lily Hoolin, Lynn Fan (Lingli Fan, Mandy Liu, Nomi Wang, Patcharawadee Leehuasa, Xueying Han & Yihe Wang, Yifei Lin, Yu Linlin,
Zishi Tu(Yuxi Chen).
13th May - 17th May
Location: Studio 1 LOCKSIDE STUDIOS, BREAM STREET,
E3 2NT
In Excess explores repetition, accumulation, and abundance through works shaped by sustained labor, serial processes, and obsessive gestures. Across painting, sculpture, photography, video, print, and text-based practices, the exhibition considers excess as both method and condition. Dense compositions, repeated forms, and amassed materials reflect the rhythms of consumption, habit, desire, and productivity embedded in everyday life. The works oscillate between order and chaos, devotion and exhaustion, asking what emerges through continual return and prolonged acts of making.
Collectively, In Excess examines how repetition can become a way of measuring time, testing limits, and persisting beyond necessity.
Exhibiting Artists:
Victoria Gong, Youngsuk Oh, Jack Sanders,
Noah Mashiak, Harshs Pratap Singh Bist,
Max L Adams, Josie Rae Turnbull, Xueqing Liang,
Gigi Zhang, Wendi Wu
22nd January - 24th January
Filet Space 1 Murray Grove, London N1 7QF.
Loose Ends brings together practices that understand making as an ongoing, temporal process rather than a finite outcome. The works presented occupy states of transition, where form remains open and material processes are allowed to unfold. In these moments, matter registers forces such as gravity, repetition, fragility, and return, situating the work within time rather than outside it.
The exhibition frames incompletion not as a deficit but as a productive condition of practice. Influenced by process based and post-minimal approaches, the works remain open to revision and reconfiguration, shaped by spatial context, embodied encounter, and contingent conditions. Development occurs through iteration, testing, and adaptation, with each presentation understood as one articulation among many.
Across the exhibition, making operates as negotiation between intention and circumstance, structure and indeterminacy. Traces of process, tests, revisions, translations, pauses, all remain visible, embedding duration within the work itself.
Loose Ends foregrounds exhibition making as a provisional event within longer trajectories of practice.
Exhibiting Artists:
Akam Valero Tarí, Allison Gretchko,
Callum Vega, Flo Moore, Haozhe Chang,
Jingyun Guan, Ken Syakira Wangsaatmadja,
Mansi Elhance, Millie Chen, Miya Sasaki,
Pranayita Myadam, Saba Safi, Shang Tao,
Simge Güçlü, Sophie Keys, Yijing Xie,
Yilun Liu, Yuxi Zhong, Xinyi Xu, Zhixiao Liu, Alexander Collinson and XinYue Ma
Communicating Culture, Identity and Emotion
Moving in Space, Place and Threshold.
13th - 15th December 2025
The Annex - 1 Tiverton Street, Elephant & Castle, London SE1 6NT
Soft Ground: Show One brings together contemporary artists whose practices probe the unstable conditions of culture, identity, and emotion within an increasingly hybrid physical–digital landscape. Their works examine how language structures perception, how technological interfaces recalibrate intimacy, and how spatial experience unfolds across both material and virtual terrains. In foregrounding thresholds, between bodies, screens, and environments, the exhibition echoes Bachelard’s claim that “space that has been seized upon by the imagination cannot remain indifferent space.” Each work becomes an active site of inquiry, mapping fluid modes of belonging and proposing new conceptual frameworks for navigating the porous realities of contemporary life.
Exhibiting artists:
ChenQi, Chi Ching Yum, David Alexander, Emma Denby, Evgeniia Kochevanova (ZUPINK), Finka Jue, Flâneuse du Mal, Lili Shen, Mengyao Li, Mia Ribić, Ornela Aliaj, Pei, Shaw Liu, Shuang Xia, Yu Yu (Spencer), Yuning Huang
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Soft Ground Show 2
Reflecting Memory and Time
Grounding in Nature and Environment
16th - 18th December 2025
The Annex - 1 Tiverton Street, Elephant & Castle, London SE1 6NT
Soft Ground: Show Two brings together contemporary artists whose practices probe the interwoven terrains of landscapes and nature, along with memory and time. Their works examine how environments, cities, and imagined terrains, illuminate ecological rhythms and the entanglements of human and nonhuman life. While also exploring the sedimentation of experience, revealing how memory, duration, and material traces shape perception and presence. In tracing these layers, the exhibition echoes James Elkins’ insight that “Art does not merely depict; it suspends time and allows the viewer to inhabit multiple durations simultaneously.” Each work becomes an active site of inquiry, mapping fluid modes of ecological and temporal engagement and inviting reflection on how we inhabit and imagine the worlds around and within us.
Exhibiting artists:
Allison Gretchko, Diego Cebrian, Ellie Lawrence, El Witt, Grace Fielder, Harsh Pratap Singh Bist, Jack Sanders, Luna Chang, Louis O'Shea, Mark G Lonsdale, Scarlett Hope-Gates, Tianyu Ren, Victoria Gumienna, Willem Keys, Xinyang Chen, Zhenghan Huang, Zhiyi Jin