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2026 OPEN CALL
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effra
curated by phoebe kaniewska
18.09 - 28.09
Have you ever noticed the plaques of the pavement of South London? Have you ever seen the tall stink pipes towering above us in Herne Hill?
The hidden River Effra has been present for much longer than all of us. As a tributary of the River Thames, it runs through South London from Upper Norwood, through Brixton, to Vauxhall. Once a key part of the landscape of rolling hills and lush fields, it is now culverted and has become a sewage system in our urban landscape.
Although now buried deep underground, the Effra has signs it is still there. Occasionally, you can hear it rushing through pipes, or notice the street signs named after it. There are still those that know the myths and legends of the river, and continue to pass them on…
As London grows ever hotter, more urban and busy, there is a flowing, rushing, cooling river beneath us. Here, we share the tales, myths and stories of the Effra to keep the spirt of the river alive - whether buried or unearthed.
holding the sun
by oko mar29.09 - 7pm
Holding the Sun' invites you to a performance where stillness, voices and movement meet.
The different sonic pieces choreographed and composed by the duo Oko Mar were specifically made for the intimate setting of the outhouse gallery.
The duo Oko Mar also collaborated with the costume designer Alice Ortona Coles and the jewelry maker Fiona Thendean.
@franziskaboehm_
@archambaulthannah
@aliceortonacoles
@fionathendean
WET (in)FORM(ation)
curated by Isabel Reed, Caitlin Fleming and Elisha Fall
3.10 - 12.10
In WET (in)FORM(ation), Marf Summers stages a look into an unintentional project formed from the quiet archival urge to document the artist’s chest in the weeks before gender affirming surgery.
Creating a wet form leather replica of their chest, the artist offers up processes of acceptance and intimacy, conducting a reverse engineering of the surgery that they were about to undertake. What started as a purely material experiment soon developed an unexpected meditation, massaging the moistened skin of the leather, creating round forms from a flat canvas, echoing the gestures of surgery. The form carried a striking presence and led to a series of self-portraits that reframed the chest as “strapped on,” emphasising its would-be flatness. Through the creation and documentation of a leather chest, the artist unwittingly develops a haunting talisman to be passed from a pre-flat world through recovery to a life post-surgery. These pieces within the close-quarters of Outhouse gallery diarises the mental effect of extreme sensory changes filtered through an autistic mind during their recovery. In the wake of the operation, they found solace and conflict through the wet mould, reactivating it as a point of adjustment and distress while they grappled with a flare-up of OCD. Ruminating, through the wearing of the chest on a familiar and unfamiliar sense of bodily self.
This installation through its tenancy at outhouse invites participants into the protective secrecy that often surrounds transition, framing the unspoken and often complex emotions of recovery, it aims to offer space where trans individuals can share personal recovery stories, and where vulnerability can be witnessed without intrusion or fear of backlash.
rise & fall
by eva sajovic18-26.10
PV: 18.10 / 5-7pm
RIP LOTUS II
Performance
Alice McCabe and Eva Sajovic
18.10 / 6pm
Rise and Fall weaves metaphors to speak of empires—their glory, their collapse, their lingering shadows. Drawing on the history and mythology of Rome, it holds a mirror to the present, asking what we must carry forward as memory, what we might transform, and what we can release.
to slime away
by dawid dzwonkowski, maria grzybowska29.09 - 01.10
... and somewhere behind you, always, the snail.
At the end of October, we’ll trace one of its endless stories - a pursuit that binds human and slug, a million dollars and immortality. Built from fragments of personal memory and everyday images, the exhibition unfolds as a collective archive, reimagined through the slow perspective of the snail.
Here, time stretches, stories dissolve into slime, and the question remains: whose story are we really following?