ARTISTS: Faek Rasoul, Kamaran Najm, Hardi Kurda, Baha Yasir, Bzhwen Jamal, Ahmad Najm, Awaz Suad, Sarina Panahideh, Hoshang Bahjat

CURATOR: Niga Salam

ENDURANCE is an exhibition of 9 Kurdish artists’ work, exploring everyday resilience in the face of on-going conflict. ENDURANCE considers how conflict continues beyond the spectacle of war; through memory, absence, and the quiet realities of daily life. Focusing on Kurdish experiences across generations, the exhibition brings together film, photography, sound, installation, and live performance. What is it when the lived experience of endurance is given visible form, in contrast to the media spectacle of conflict?

ARTISTS: Ye Funa, Xu Bing

CURATORS: Leixinyun Huang, Yifan Yang

Nowadays, digital culture enters everyone's life through screens, with the image economy spreading at a speed far exceeding that of text. It has become a way of life and a cultural vocabulary, an indispensable part of our lives. However, few people think about how it is re-shaping our lives. How has digital culture quietly become a daily habit? How do contemporary artists interact in this context?

ARTISTS: Robyn Bamford, Ashanti Hare, Emma Saffy Wilson, Ella Yolande

CURATORS: Indie Hansford, Theadora Perignon, Laila Ross

When the earth holds us quietly, what can we learn? This exhibition explores ecological reconnection and regeneration through art, treating the earth as a living witness. Demonstrating intention and care using natural, foraged, and found materials, the artworks capture how the earth co-exists with human methods of expression. Each work is only possible through the artists’ presence with their materials and the environments that they inhabit.

These practices are materially rooted in place, but ask bigger questions about belonging, climate instability, systems of value, non-heteronormativity, the more-than-human, colonialism, and sensorial engagement. When The Earth Holds Us Quietly acts as a place of rest, an escape from life above ground, and a reminder of how earth, memory and devotion are woven together.

ARTISTS / GROUPS: Sam Goodwin, Agnieszka Wanowicz, Devon Federation of Women’s Institutes

CURATOR: Rebecca Wood

Parish Maps: Then, Now, Next revisits the influential Parish Maps project developed by the arts and environmental charity Common Ground to explore what it means to map place today.

First initiated in 1987, Parish Maps invited artists and communities to creatively map the places that mattered to them, celebrating everyday landscapes and local distinctiveness. Drawing on this legacy, the exhibition reimagines mapping within 21st century Exeter through a layered display of archival material and contemporary responses. Exeter-based artist Sam Goodwin presents an illustrative printed map exploring themes of protest, punk culture, and ecology, alongside the collaborative Stitched Stories: River map developed with community groups and museum visitors through workshops led by artist Agnieszka Eden at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery. Together with a selection of archival objects from Exeter’s history, these works connect personal memories and experiences to the city’s material past.

Within the exhibition space, visitors are invited to contribute to a large communal map of Exeter. This celebrates daily experiences of Exeter and demonstrates how mapping is a collective practice shaped by everyday interactions.

ARTISTS: Alison Murray, Mandy Griffiths, Amy Brushaber, Galawezh Mohammed Sabir & Niga Salam, Catherine Waite, Terry Cann, Tricia Zakreski, Sophie Pettit

CURATORS: Kaia Brushaber, Liv Pattimore, Moyan Zhang

Phantom Threads is an exhibition that focuses on artists and makers working with textile practices. It explores how craft carries traces of labour, care, gender, and memory through everyday making, matrilineal inheritance and embodied experience. The exhibition foregrounds makers’ creative practices and celebrates their material and emotional contribution, giving what is stereotypically seen as ‘women’s work’ more visibility and showcasing its often-underappreciated value. In addition to the exhibition, Phantom Threads is facilitating a programme of free participatory workshops and events teaching and sharing the experience of knitting, mending, and textile-based making, encouraging connections and skill-sharing across generations.