open call: alter peckham - london design festival 2025

SPIRA9, the official partner of London Design Festival 2025, invites artists, designers, performers, and interdisciplinary makers to submit work for Everything Then is Now – Alter Peckham, a week-long nomadic group exhibition set within the evocative relic space of Peckham Rye Station.

Exhibition Details

Everything Then is Now – Alter Peckham

Exhibition Dates: 15/09/2025 – 21/09/2025

Location: The Old Waiting Room, Peckham Rye Station, London

Official Partner: London Design Festival

With support from: The Arch Company, Southwark Council, Arts Council England, Royal College of Art, The Architectural Heritage Fund, Heritage Lottery Fund

Exhibition Overview:

As the inaugural presentation of SPIRA9’s nomadic series Othering, Everything Then is Now – Alter Peckham explores the cyclical and ever-shifting nature of identity, space, and belonging in contemporary society.

Set in Peckham—a dynamic cultural nexus in South London—the exhibition invites artists to collectively build a temporary realm of ‘otherness’, where time, memory, and perception converge.

The venue, The Old Waiting Room at Peckham Rye Station, is a dormant Victorian-era architectural relic in the heart of Peckham.

After lying sealed for over fifty years, it was reactivated in 2023 by artist Sarah Sze’s installation Metronome, which reconstructed the space through light, rhythm, and image, rekindling the flow of time within its long-suspended architecture.

We approach this site as a liminal zone: a space suspended between rural and urban, between what was and what is yet to come.

Alter Peckham is not a restoration or occupation of the space, but an invitation to reveal its inherent complexity and artistic potential—to treat it as an unfinished canvas where multiple narratives can coexist.

We invite artists of all media, those who work in the thresholds of form, discipline, and identity, to bring their personal landscapes of space, time, perception, corporeality, and self into this historically charged yet publicly distant site.

Over seven days, we will co-create a transient realm of "otherness," inviting participants and audiences alike to step outside of habitual frameworks and inhabit a space of fluid identities and intertwined perceptions.

This exhibition seeks to challenge the contemporary usage of the term “Othering,” often reduced to narratives of exclusion or marginalisation.

Here, we reimagine it not as an endpoint but as a method of transformation—a chance to embrace difference as a site of connection, hybridisation, and radical coexistence. In this context, “the Other” is not a source of fear, but a generator of new forms, voices, and relations.

Everything Then is Now also marks SPIRA9’s debut curatorial intervention at The Old Waiting Room, ahead of its planned redevelopment as a permanent cultural venue.

Through collaboration with London Design Festival, Southwark Council, and various public institutions, this temporary exhibition aims to awaken the spatial imagination of a place once forgotten—staging a dialogue between past reverberations and future emergence.

By activating this historical threshold space, we open an inquiry into how place, difference, and the in-between can become active sites of identity-making and belonging.

All artistic media are welcome to join this nomadic gathering, including painting, printmaking, digital art, sculpture, 3D art, textile and fiber arts, photography, film, installation, and conceptual art.

We also celebrate art that moves, interacts, and transforms—performance art, new media, and any work that breathes life into the moment.

Open Call Timeline

Please note: We will publish two batches of media features on SPIRA9’s official website and social media channels before the exhibition. If you wish to be included in these early features, please submit your work by the corresponding deadlines below.

Press Release

• First Press Release Date: 8 August 2025
• Submission Deadline for Inclusion: 1 August 2025, 23:59 (BST)
• Second Release Date: 20 August 2025
• Submission Deadline for Inclusion: 13 August 2025, 23:59 (BST)

Final Submission Deadline

• Deadline: 27 August 2025, 23:59 (BST)

SubmissionForm: https://forms.gle/SGZpXPBc91MiRiyc6

*Selected artists will be contacted directly via email.