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Visual Arts & Culture at RALLY 2025.

Over the past two years we’ve invited you to join us in Southwark Park. Each meeting had its own quiet purpose — resisting the algorithm, celebrating the art of gathering.

This year – in the face of the world’s ongoing fractures and challenges – we choose to build through them. We turn to art, and eachother, to explore how we gather, create, and respond.

Our Visual Arts & Culture Programme returns this August with artists, architects, and collectives who are confronting the present with care, urgency, and imagination.

All united by sharp awareness and a shared urgency to ask – how do we live now, and what materials, methods, and messages might carry us forward?

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Our Arts Tours also return this year led by programme curator Haja Fanta. These will start from Southwark Park’s bandstand, with Haja guiding you through all the installations positioned throughout the site. Information for joining the tours will be published closer to the event.

Abi Haywood
Ceramic Sculpture and Sound – The Môr the Merrier Sculptures and radio play.

Abi Haywood, also known as ‘Big Jugs’, is a London-based artist from Cardigan, West Wales. Her interdisciplinary practice spans ceramics, sculpture, sound, radio plays, and multimedia installations. Her ongoing radio play, The Môr the Merrier, is a comedic exploration of small-town life and coastal gentrification in Wales, inspired by Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood. She voices all characters and creates the sound design, capturing the quick-witted rhythm of Welsh storytelling. Abi studied Fine Art with Art History at the Slade School of Fine Art (UCL) and Ceramics at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Adult Entertainment 
James Massiah + more.
Anti-typical poetry and spoken word night and collective Adult Entertainment, founded by friend of the RALLY friend James Massiah, returns to Southwark Park with a curation and takeover in our pub space.

Akiko Nakayama
Floating Points (live)
Akiko Nakayama is a Tokyo-based visual artist renowned for her mesmerising "alive paintings" — dynamic, fluid artworks created by manipulating liquids like ink and paint. Blending art with science, her process invites natural forces to shape the intricate details of her visuals. Akiko has brought her signature kinetic style to music videos for Floating Points, including the newly released Key103, crafting immersive, transfixing experiences that echo the music’s energy. These visuals will feature on Floating Points’ live performance at RALLY 2025.

Bernice Mulenga
Moving Image - ‘WAISTLINE THEORY’
Bernice Mulenga is a British-Congolese photographer and filmmaker with a distinct aptitude for archiving, documenting and interrogating the world around them. Their work focuses on their community and the experiences within it—most notably found in their ongoing decade long photo series #friendsonfilm. For RALLY they present a film titled “WAISTLINE THEORY” that focuses on the freedom found at the waistline. A nod to their Congolese heritage and love of the dance floor.

Camden Art Centre
Anna Howard
Free contemporary art gallery, cafe, garden and shop in Hampstead offering a programme of temporary exhibitions, residencies and courses. This year Camden Art Centre presents works from Bristol-based Anna Howard, who was part of the 2024 New Contemporaries cohort and has recently exhibited at the ICA.

Cem A.
Installation – Maybe the Real Art Is the Friends We Made Along the Way
Cem A. is an artist with a background in anthropology, known for the art meme page Freeze Magazine and site-specific installations. His work explores virality and performativity, often through collaboration. His exhibitions include the Barbican, ZKM Karlsruhe, Berlinische Galerie, Louisiana Museum, and Künstlerhaus Bethanien. He has shown work at documenta fifteen, Istanbul Modern, Mudam Luxembourg, Klima Biennale Vienna, and others, and has lectured at RCA London, HEAD Geneva, KASK Ghent, and UdK Berlin. For RALLY, an inflatable gate greets visitors with the phrase “Maybe the Real Art Is the Friends We Made Along the Way.” This participatory piece blurs the line between audience and artwork, drawing on Fluxus ideas reframed through a non-Western lens to explore art as a collective, relational experience.

@Disturbance
Presenting the works of BIO GAL 
@Disturance have a long term commitment to a collaborative approach to artistic curation, bringing other valued voices in, disturbance have been moving the needle forward artistically whilst centering Queer voices.

Gallery of the Giants
Microgalleries - Lousia Fitch
Gallery of the Giants is a series of micro galleries by artist and curator Louisa Fitch, with the first permanent space located in Aldbourne, Wiltshire. Created to celebrate emerging and local artists, the project brings art into everyday spaces and underrepresented communities. At RALLY, three micro galleries are scattered across the site, each co-curated by Fitch and a rising artist in Drawing, Painting, or Photography. The exhibitions critically explore how identity and experience are shaped by today’s political, social, and cultural forces—offering playful yet engaged reflections on the world around us.

Ibrahim Azab
Sculpture and photography
Ibrahim Azab is a London-based artist and curator working across sculpture, performance, and photography. His practice centers on process, perception, and the blurred lines between the subconscious and reality within a post-capitalist context. Through digital and physical interventions, he explores the photograph as object, focusing on failure, storytelling, and the act of seeing and unseeing. His piece for RALLY will present a concept in relation to sculptural practice.

IKLECTIK
Returning to RALLY, Iklectik Art Lab is a self-funded creative platform founded in 2014 that showcases contemporary art, experimental music, and artistic critical practice. Our aim is to focus on experimentation in arts, sound art, installation, and cross-disciplinary works. We want to expand our space as a research arts laboratory where interdisciplinary lines can overlap to create projects that explore processes and techniques, and address social, political, cultural, and critical issues.

Maria Joranko
Installation
MARIA (Maria Joranko, b. Pierre, SD) is a high-femme Latine/American writer, performer, and artist. Her work spans sculpture, performance, video, and sound, exploring solidarity, chronic illness, race, and speculative futures. Using her own body as both subject and tool, she blends organic and digital materials to imagine radical, liberatory connections. "I will be building a series of custom guitars that will be suspended in a circle in a grouping of trees, each with etched floral designs and laser-cut phrases. The guitars will be tech and instrument hybrids that omit sound, offering space for reflection and transformation".

Mattia Guarnera-MacCarthy
Mattia Guarnera-MacCarthy's artistic practice revolves around an exploration of the human condition, employing visual language borrowed from the realms of sports and entertainment as a catalyst for deeper understanding. Fascinated by the complexities and nuances that permeate everyday life, Guarnera-MacCarthy strives to capture and dissect these intricacies through his work. Uncanny airbrushed paintings of muscular bodies and sweaty sportsmen have made him one of London's most exciting up and comers.

SET Studios
Sculpture – Kumbirai Makumbe
SET Centre CIO (charity no. 1170903) offers some of London’s most affordable artists’ studios to a community of over 1,000 artists. Across fourteen centres in vacant buildings, SET hosts free exhibitions, workshops, and events using a DIY, meanwhile-use model that revitalises disused spaces. They present the work of Kumbirai Makumbe, a Zimbabwean artist based in London. Their work explores fabulation as a method for creating alternative theologies and worlds — building spiritual and aesthetic systems through sculpture, digital media, and installation. Their practice constructs speculative, symbolic, and cosmological forms that support new ways of being. For RALLY 2025, Gloriosa Superba — named after Zimbabwe’s national flower — serves as a self-portrait. The Flame Lily is both beautiful and toxic; it contains colchicine, a poisonous compound that also has healing properties when used in medicine. Makumbe found this duality fitting for the piece.

Southwark Park Galleries
Artist-led gallery hosting contemporary art exhibitions in purpose-built space. They are an important neighbourhood anchoring, institutional collaboration, and physical site specificity.

Studio/Chapple

Studio/Chapple is a contemporary art gallery and project space in Deptford, South-East London. Founded in November 2022, Studio/Chapple looked to create a dialogue between the contemporary art and underground music scenes of London. Now operating simultaneously as a gallery and event space, the project draws on founder Louis Chapple’s experience as a jazz musician, DJ and work as a curator to activate a unique conversation around the relationship between sonic and visual artistic ecologies.

Their dynamic programme calls on a diverse range of practices that are united in their conceptual rigour and embodiment of contemporary critical discourse. They prioritise experimental and audiovisual practices, often giving young artists their first solo shows that result in ambitious installations within the space. The programme subsequently extends beyond exhibitions into performances, club nights, radio and live sonic interventions. They work on equal terms with artists, curators, DJs, musicians and sound systems across London, highlighting a rich ecosystem of sonic and visual cultural production both within and beyond the gallery.

The Toe Rag
Magazine
The Toe Rag is a quarterly print magazine covering contemporary culture, spanning visual art, music, architecture, theatre, performance, fashion, politics and literature. Founded in December 2023, The Toe Rag publish work that is formally ambitious, considered and incisive. Our issues feature essays, reviews, interviews,  fiction, poetry and art. Our back pages include event listings, puzzles, games, an agony aunt and a Page 3. Find them in the pub, at RALLY 2025. 

Trackie McLeod
Sculpture/Print
Trackie McLeod is a Scottish artist based in Glasgow. Trackie uses sculpture, textiles, video and print to explore his lived experience. He is interested in ideas of masculinity and Queerness and their intersection with class, politics and popular culture. His visual language is innately Scottish, describing it as “one part tongue-in-cheek, an ounce of sarcasm and a pint of Tennent’s lager”.

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All Collaborators & Partners

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Abi Haywood

Adult Entertainment

Akiko Nakayama

Anna Howard

Bernice Mulenga

BIO GAL

Camden Art Centre

Cem A.

@Disturbance

Gallery of Giants

Ibrahim Azab

IKLECTIK

Kumbirai Makumbe

Maria Joranko

Mattia Guarnera-MacCarthy

SET Studios

Southwark Park Galleries

Studio/Chapple

The Toe Rag

Trackie Mcleod