Exeter city centre to host international art exhibitions exploring global crises

Exeter city centre is to be transformed into an open-air art gallery showcasing work by international artists that aims to reimagine responses to modern social, ecological, and technological crises.

The five contemporary art exhibitions and installations, running under the theme of "REWORLDING," will take place across various city venues from 5 to 14 June 2026.

The project has been organised by postgraduate students on the MA Curation course at the University of Exeter as part of their final graduation projects.

Exhibits featuring textiles, maps, audio, film, and photography will focus on the theme of "repair."

Among the locations involved is Exeter Library, which will host Parish Maps: Then, Now, Next, curated by Rebecca Wood.

The exhibition revisits a 1987 initiative by the arts and environmental charity Common Ground, which asked members of the public to creatively map their local areas based on personal landmarks, memories, and stories rather than traditional boundaries.

The new display will bring together original archival maps alongside newly commissioned, collaborative works to explore what mapping means in contemporary Exeter.

At the University of Exeter's Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, an exhibition titled ENDURANCE, curated by Niga Salam, will showcase film, photography, sound, installations, and performances by eight Kurdish artists. The collection depicts everyday resilience against a backdrop of ongoing conflict in the region.

In the city centre, the former Body Shop unit (Unit 5) in the Guildhall Shopping Centre will host Ways of (Machine) Seeing, curated by Leixinyun Huang and Yifan Yang.

The exhibition features work by the world-renowned Chinese artist Xu Bing alongside emerging practitioner Ye Funa. It looks at how digital culture, facial recognition, surveillance, and the growing use of images over text have integrated into daily life.

Meanwhile, Exeter's historic Underground Passages will feature When the Earth Holds Us Quietly, curated by Indie Hansford, Thea Perignon, and Laila Ross. The exhibition includes sculpture, textiles, audio, and film made from natural, foraged, and found materials by artists collaborating with the land.

The final exhibition, Phantom Threads, will be held at Positive Light Projects on Sidwell Street. Curated by Kaia Brushaber, Liv Pattimore, and Moyan Zhang, the textile exhibition aims to give greater visibility to craft and what is stereotypically viewed as underappreciated "women's work," highlighting themes of labour, care, gender, and memory.

A programme of free public workshops and events covering knitting, mending, and textile-making will run alongside the display to encourage cross-generational skill-sharing.

The MA Curation: Contemporary Art and Cultural Management course is a one-year postgraduate programme at the University of Exeter. It combines academic study with professional training, giving students the option to organise their own curatorial project in their final term.

All exhibitions will be open daily from 11am to 4pm.