Corridor8

The first installation I encounter in the Hyundai Translocal Series: Entangled and Woven at the Whitworth is Jounghye Yoo’s ‘Gilded Veil_A Mysterious Curtain Lightly Draped in Gold’(2025). I walk through a tunnel of cotton and silk panels with golden embroidery, its archway inspired by the gate of the Vishwanath Temple in Varanasi, Northwest India.

On entering What Grows in Between at The New Art Gallery Walsall, it is difficult not to look upwards. Suspended high above the gallery floor, Hannah Rollason’s white plaster forms ‘Rhizomatic’ (2026), stretch across the building’s vast, tall concrete ceiling like interconnected root systems, fungal networks or constellations suspended in mid-air.

For the exhibition and accompanying book, You can never really return home, Elliott Flanagan returned to his hometown to reflect on memories of the Burnley he knew and the place he encounters today. Commissioned by East Lancashire’s Super Slow Way, Flanagan worked with a women’s group in Stoops Estate.

Through experimental writing and editorial workshops with artists Anna Barham and Kevin Hunt, Ikon Youth Programme (IYP) at Ikon Gallery have been rethinking how they might critically examine an artist’s practice with the written word. Continually re-processing their thoughts, feelings and feedback whilst interpreting the work of Angela de la Cruz, this co-authored text comes full circle to suggest new ways of thinking about and responding to contemporary art in Birmingham.

Common Ground: Sleaford’s Shared Stories is the first major collaboration between two cultural organisations in Sleaford: the Hub and Sleaford Museum. Themes of industry, migration and identity are explored in this multifaceted exhibition that takes place simultaneously across both sites, with commissioned artists responding to the town’s local histories and collections, offering new and layered perspectives on Sleaford’s heritage.

MIMA, New Contemporaries, installation view. Photo credit, Rachel Deakin. New Contemporaries selects; it does not curate. Harsh? Maybe. Selection is only the first curatorial act—the harder one is what happens when unrelated practices have to share a building. And it is freeing to be handed a blank sheet and asked to make a show from work that was never chosen with a throughline in mind. The organisation’s own throughline is Access—a big word, daunting and thrilling to work with.

Short painted marks dash across the canvases in Oliver Benoit’s solo exhibition Roots Through Ruins, often forming around a central impression that contrasts with the surrounding colours. The surfaces are dense, textural, with grit embedded into paint and built up through repetition of wide brushstrokes. Some marks appear briskly applied over the surface, while others form concentrated blocks of saturation underneath.

This review has been written by Review Collective (RC), a group of creatives based in the North West who meet monthly, online or in person, to write and share critical responses to art and culture. RC is a project by Artist-led St Helens, an artist-run studio in St Helens, on the outskirts of Liverpool City Region. We were invited to review the Gender Stories exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery not long after the local elections in St Helens brought in a Reform-led council.

“Once…. In the future, there was a place where ideas and thoughts fractured. It was a forest, it was a fortress, it was filled with secrets from the past. Journeys occurred where groups of adventurers found their way through the shadows and echoes. Here we stand at the precipice of a fragmented tomorrow. Here we gather the fragments of lost knowledge, piecing together the memories they tried to erase.

A huge textile artwork, ‘Mahabharata’ (2024), stretches twelve metres across the length of a gallery wall at Liverpool’s Bluecoat. It hangs at the centre of Jalsaghar, an exhibition by Edinburgh-based artist Debjani Banerjee. This densely appliquéd tapestry is a kaleidoscope of bright colours and kitschy imagery, and invites close looking to unravel what’s going on – and there’s a lot going on.