• My London Gallery Weekend route takes you around the East End and into the night. As director of Chisenhale Gallery, and previously of Auto Italia, I’ve spent years building close ties with the area’s artistic community, and this route follows the spaces, streets and late-night spots that make the East End such a vital part of London’s cultural life. 
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    My London Gallery Weekend route takes you around the East End and into the night. As director of Chisenhale Gallery, and previously of Auto Italia, I’ve spent years building close ties with the area’s artistic community, and this route follows the spaces, streets and late-night spots that make the East End such a vital part of London’s cultural life. 

    I’d begin the day—obviously (!) —in Bethnal Green at Chisenhale Gallery, where we are currently exhibiting London-based artist Rachel Crowther, whose installations move between military infrastructure, neurochemical signalling, and histories of psychological design to explore how bodies are processed, manipulated, and soothed within institutional spaces and systems.

    I’d then take the short walk down Roman Road to Herald St Gallery, where Japanese artist Naotaka Hiro offers an interesting counterpart to Rachel’s works: both are interested in how the body is shaped by forces beyond conscious control. 

    You’re spoiled for choice here, with Maureen Paley and Rose Easton situated right next to Herald St. Delaine Le Bas is showing at Maureen Paley, whilst Rose Easton is exhibiting Jan Gatewood, who explores two events in his personal history to offer kaleidoscopic perspectives on theft and authorship in art making. Now walk up Cambridge Heath Road towards Soft Opening, which is presenting a group exhibition, before working your way east towards Emalin—their Clerk’s House location, followed by their new space on Helmet Row. If you get hungry on the way, take a detour via BRAT and don’t skip the bread. 

    Emalin, Helmet Row, presents a solo exhibition from Alvaro Barrington, whose works combine abstraction, collage, and references to hip-hop, Caribbean culture, and art history to explore identity, diaspora, and collective memory. Finish the day at Public Gallery, which is showing works by Russell Perkins, whose practice examines the increasing financialization of culture, considering how risk, precarity, and economic imperatives register at the level of the individual. 

    For those night owls out there, you’re within touching distance of an eclectic array of bars and clubs in East. Personally, I'm obsessed with drinking cocktails at Duck and Waffle in the Heron Tower. My friends always laugh at me because they think it's naff, but I am kind of obsessed with going at 6am. It's quite silly and fun if you haven't been. 

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