Buffeted by unreason, anxiety and bubbling hate, we need to build safe spaces where what is beautiful in being human can be explored.

Space36 has invited nine artists to construct beauty in the performance of their art practice, to discover or invent a jagged notion of beauty that is appropriate for our times.

We want to open up the idea of beauty- going beyond traditional notions of ideal form and good taste, or the avantgarde’s suspicion of beauty as ideologically complicit with political power, to even more ancient ideas of the beautiful as an ethical way of being human.

In the exhibition, the artists position beauty as variously performative, democratic, subversive, and not limited to the visual.  Christina Lovey's and Lisa Kreuziger's participative works underline the democratic, open ended nature of beauty; Marta Pieregonczuk, La Liana  and Tom Hackett play with classical notions of beauty and the pleasures and pains of attempting to fix desire; Liz Brown, Ahmed Farooqui and Louise Scillitoe-Brown experiment in the field of the visual while Jeannette Abi Khalil questions the privilege that is accorded the visual over the cognitive in western discourse.

Tom Hackett
Grasping beauty, installation

Grasping Beauty maps the shift of aesthetics and beauty from classical to atomized cultural reference points. It is a playful attempt to prod the paradoxical act of ‘grasping’ and fixing desire in an otherwise bewilderingly fragmented world without clear signposts, via a wheelbarrow, a ceramic head, and some concrete letters.’

Lisa Kreuziger
Bubble factory, participatory work

Based on the idea of art as a social experience, Lisa Kreuziger‘s Bubble Factory invites visitors to create soap bubble scenarios.   It engages visitors in the creative process and strives to foster interaction, both among participants and with the various dimensions of the ephemeral work of art itself.

Jeannette Abi Khalil
The images we see ......, installation

Jeannette Abi Khalil’s minimal work aims at challenging conventional notions of beauty and encouraging the exercise of conscious awareness. Beauty is perceived and interpreted in the brain and, by applying conscious thinking, we can change our brains and, thus, the way we view beauty.

La Liana
I'll be beautiful, video performance

I’ll be beautiful  is a repetitive and obsessive act  in the desperate seeking of an imposed beauty and perfection.  It is the realisation of how society can drive and impose status symbols which become cages from where individuals have few escapes. The work dares the common conception of beauty with sarcasm and a bittersweet point of view. 

Louise Scillitoe-Brown
Stand, installation

Louise Scillitoe-Brown takes the fractal as the starting point of her works, exploring the foundational aesthetics of patterns that repeat themselves at different scales of time and space - familiar yet unique, individual yet formulaic. 

Christina Lovey
The tale of the seven scorpions

This work reimagines contemporary notions of beauty by reconnecting with the stories and mythologies of ancient peoples. Taking as its starting point the Scorpion and the Witch, this piece considers the question 'what is the meaning of beauty?', challenging our preconceptions through the use of story and a divination game.

Marta Pieregonchuk
The beauty within, installation

Suspended from the outside wall of Space 36, this work is an attempt  to undress the building as well as metaphorically unwrapping the individual. It invites the viewer to look at their surroundings in a different way, to look deeper within and unveil that which is most valuable and beautiful.

Liz Brown
a darkroom in a garden, installation

Liz Brown works with alternative photographic process, cyanotype and chlorophyll printing , which require long exposure to produce beautiful prints of natural objects in the environment. At Space36 she will experiment with using chlorophyll printing to produce portraits of the other artists.

Ahmed Farooqui
Through other eyes, video installation


Ahmed Farooqui finds beauty in the aesthetics of the social order which is all around us and which we rarely register. However, seen through the eyes of refugees risking their lives to flee from chaos and disorder, the routine and ordered elements of our everyday life take on a pleasurable character.
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