London E3 5QZ
United Kingdom
Hours: Wednesday–Sunday 12–6pm
Chisenhale Gallery commissions and produces contemporary art. We are an artist-centred organisation, dedicated to championing risk, experimentation, and critical thinking through the creation of groundbreaking work by today’s most significant early-career artists.
Operating as a production agency, exhibition space, and research centre, we support international and UK-based artists to pursue new directions and make their most ambitious work to date. Premiering four major new commissions, our 2026 programme foregrounds radically experimental exhibition-making and critically engaged, artist-driven practice.
Arash Nassiri
January 18–March 22, 2026
Opening: Saturday, January 17, 2026
Arash Nassiri is an artist living and working in Berlin. His moving image practice draws on the visual languages of music videos, television, and cinema to explore memory, heritage, and complex narratives of place. Often reworking popular formats into speculative, allegorical forms, Nassiri’s films investigate how the built environment embodies histories of migration and displacement. For his first institutional solo exhibition, Nassiri presents A Bug’s Life, a surreal moving image installation set in a Beverly Hills mansion, one of many developed in the 1980s–90s that blended Iranian and American architectural features in a style that was later banned by the city of Los Angeles. Guided by an insect puppet voiced by the artist’s mother, the film humorously weaves oral history with illusion to reflect on belonging, estrangement, and the spectral narratives embedded in urban space.
Racheal Crowther
April 17–June 14, 2026
Opening: Thursday, April 16, 2026
Racheal Crowther is a London-based artist whose practice examines governance, surveillance, and institutional power, tracing their entanglement with systems of care. Her practice repurposes technical apparatus and industrial objects charged with memory to reveal failures in bureaucracy and the persistent grip of institutional structures on daily life. For the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition, Crowther will investigate the politics of scent as a tool of influence and social control. Tracing the many roles of sensory manipulation across time and space – from the imperceptible conditioning of commercial environments to deployment within military and policing apparatuses – the commission conceptualises olfactory manufacturing as a medium through which atmospheres are engineered and behaviours directed.
Jasper Marsalis
July 10–September 6, 2026
Opening: Thursday, July 9, 2026
Jasper Marsalis is a London-based artist and musician working in painting, sculpture, and moving image. Interested in staging, liveness, and temporality, Marsalis’ installations question what it means to make, circulate, and encounter images in a culture defined by constant visual mediation. Often engaging with production environments, his works transform spaces into sites where the optics of performance come into focus and where conventional forms of duration and spectatorship are expanded and made contingent. For his first solo exhibition in a UK institution, Marsalis is developing a new installation that engages with the themes of gesture, choreography, and broadcasting, expanding his interests in reimagining the gallery as a live, temporal site of encounter.
Wakaliga Uganda
October 2–December 6, 2026
Opening: Thursday, October 1, 2026
Wakaliga Uganda, also known as Wakaliwood, is a film collective based in the Wakaliga district of Kampala. Founded by Isaac and Harriet Nabwana, the collective has gained cult status for producing ultra-low-budget moving image works that appropriate and rework the grammar and visual language of Western action cinema. Films feature explosive sequences and high-octane storytelling, mobilising DIY production strategies and collaborative modes of production into vivid films, which offer playful and incisive critiques of global power dynamics. The group’s first solo exhibition in the UK will premiere a newly commissioned film exploring the historical and political resonance of the warrior Kibuuka Omumbaale from the Kingdom of Buganda, a god of the Baganda people of central Uganda.
The 2026 Commissions Programme partners include Fondation Pernod Ricard, Paris; Bétonsalon – Centre for Art and Research, Paris; and Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin. Produced with support from the Chisenhale Gallery Commissions Circle; Dr Juli Crocombe; The Elephant Trust; and the Paul and Louise Cooke Endowment. The 2025-26 Asymmetry Curatorial Research Fellow is hosted by Chisenhale Gallery.
Chisenhale Gallery’s current exhibition sphere music by Grant Mooney is on view until December, 7 2025.
For further information please contact Sutton: chisenhale@suttoncomms.com
Chisenhale Gallery is a registered charity and part of Arts Council England’s National Portfolio. All of our exhibitions are free.
