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United Kingdom
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Gasworks is a leading non-profit organisation based in south London. Working at the intersection of UK and international contemporary art, we have supported more than 700 artists from over 100 countries since our founding in 1994.
We commission exhibitions by UK-based and international artists, and host residencies that enable artists from all over the world to research and develop new work in London. We also provide subsidised studios for London-based artists and co-design participation projects together with local community partners.
In 2026 Gasworks presents four solo exhibitions by Umi Ishihara, Gabriel Abrantes, Thuy Tien Nguyen and Paloma Contreras Lomas.
Umi Ishihara
January 22–March 22, 2026
Umi Ishihara is a Japanese artist and filmmaker based in London. Her subversive films mix documentary and fiction, often including marginalised ideas and voices, and casts made up of non-actors, friends and family. At Gasworks, Umi will present a new commission that follows women in Tokyo working in strip clubs whose lives have been shaped by music, nightlife, and drug-taking. Through their stories, she explores the blurred boundaries between pleasure and vulnerability in spaces that awaken after dark.
Gabriel Abrantes
April 15–June 14, 2026
Gabriel Abrantes is an artist and filmmaker based in Lisbon. For his first solo exhibition in the UK, he will present Bardo Loops, a four-channel video installation in which animated ghosts living in a dystopian future ravaged by rains, floods and fires have conversations, fight, argue, cry, break up and have sex. These avatars cycle through topics that are both real and current, oblivious to the ongoing devastation around them, fully absorbed in their own personal dramas.
Thuy Tien Nguyen
July 9–September 13, 2026
Thuy Tien Nguyen is an artist based between Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and Hanoi, Vietnam. Nguyen’s commission at Gasworks will take the form of a skeletal conveyor belt installation that mixes Vietnamese, Thai and British vernacular objects and sound. Evoking a system to circulate, compress and categorise, the work questions how identities and memories are formed, fragmented and circulated like a lost suitcase.
Paloma Contreras Lomas
October 1–December 13, 2026
Paloma Contreras Lomas is an artist based in Mexico whose multidisciplinary practice explores Latin American science fiction, landscape, terror, political satire and ‘the bad taste of the Mexican Middle Class.’ Contreras Lomas’s commission will comprise an ‘installation-underworld’ inspired by the Antigone’s of Latin America. It follows a residency she will undertake at Gasworks in January–March 2026.
Acknowledgements
All exhibitions are supported by Gasworks Exhibition Supporters and public funding from Arts Council England. Umi Ishihara’s exhibition is supported by Catherine Petitgas, Cockyane Grants for the Arts, the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation, the Kumagai Masatoshi Culture Foundation and the Yoshino Gypsum Art Foundation. Thuy Tien Nguyen’s exhibition is commissioned by Thailand Biennale, Phuket and Gasworks, London. Paloma Contreras Lomas’s residency and exhibition are supported by Prue MacLeod with additional support from Fundación Ama Amoedo.
Gasworks’ current exhibition Mémoires des corps by Marie-Claire Messouma Manlanbien is open until December 14, 2025.
