Alice Hattrick

This route threads together artists who work with fragments. These artists treat the archive as partial or damaged, where gaps and silences become sites of possibility and resistance. Their work considers how the past continues to structure the present through material accumulation and juxtaposition, revising and remaking. These exhibitions resonate with my own work, which often begins with fragments: partial archives, damaged histories or small material traces. I approach these gaps as openings, allowing for new connections between past and present that speak to contemporary conditions, particularly the experiences of queer and disabled people navigating precarious forms of labour and care.

Start at Lisson Gallery (Edgware Road station), where Lubaina Himid and Magda Stawarska present Zanzibar (1999–2022) ahead of Himid’s British Pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale. The work reimagines nine diptychs Himid painted in 1999, paired with a layered “libretto” composed by Stawarska from voices, archival fragments and performed texts. Himid has been an influential figure in British culture since the 1980s, both as a key member of the BLK Art Group, curating exhibitions that challenged the exclusion of Black artists from British institutions, and through a practice that continues to revise and reframe exclusionary histories. Himid and Stawarska's ongoing collaboration treats hidden or contested histories as something to be revisited rather than resolved, reflecting on movement, memory and loss.

Take the bus to Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery in Fitzrovia, where works by Australian artist Gabriella Possum Nungurray draw on ancestral knowledge and intergenerational transmission. Her paintings represent traditional stories from her mother and grandmother, sustaining a lived relationship to land and kinship through ongoing acts of attention and care. This exhibition highlights the ongoing significance of the Papunya art community, established 240km north-west of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory in 1972. Nungurray is the eldest daughter of Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, one of the founding group of painters whose style derives directly from traditional body and sand painting associated with ceremony.

Nearby on Great Portland Street, Niru Ratnam presents an exhibition of works by Keith Piper, a founding member of the BLK Art Group. Placing works from the 1980s in dialogue with the present, the archive becomes a site of assembly and reworking, rather than passive inheritance. Drawing on archival fragments, text and image, Piper’s work examines how histories of race and empire are constructed through visual culture—who is seen, who is obscured.

Luxembourg + Co. near Piccadilly Circus is staging an exhibition of stained glass, from medieval examples to Paul Klee and Brice Marden. The exhibition foregrounds making as a form of knowledge, where the fascinating material processes of stained-glass—cutting, leading, layering and firing—structure how images are experienced through fragmentation and light.

In East London, Gray Wielebinski’s Bring Me Men at Nicoletti examines how masculinity is produced and performed. Sculptural assemblages of everyday objects evoke bedrooms and lockers, spaces where identity takes shape through the unresolved accumulation and layering of cultural and personal references.

At The Approach, Sara Cwynar’s Baby Blue Benzo brings together film, photography and archival imagery in a continuous horizontal scroll. Drawing on stock images and personal material, the work reflects on the conditions of contemporary image production and circulation, a temporal experience shaped by repetition and overload.

Across these exhibitions, the archive is personal and collective, revealing how identities are formed through what is gathered, kept, hidden or discarded. These artists also attend to what is often overlooked: partial records, craft traditions and everyday acts of assembly. Making emerges as a way of living with the past as it is continually made and remade in the present.