SPIRA9, in partnership with the London Design Festival, invites artists, architects, designers, performers, and interdisciplinary makers to submit proposals for Everything Then is Now – Alter Peckham, a week-long site-responsive exhibition unfolding within the liminal space of The Old Waiting Room at 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

Open Call Deadline: 27/08/2025

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.

Benefits for Selected Artists:

The artworks will be exhibited at a Peckham Rye Station Waiting Room,  

The SPIRA9 exhibition team will provide optimal exhibition planning and technical support for each piece.

Artists will receive an official invitation letter and a recommendation letter personally signed by the gallery owner.

The artworks will be permanently displayed on the gallery's official website and widely promoted through social media.

Online and print exhibition coverage by London Design Festival, a leading UK creative media outlet.

Official exhibition news in the renowned UK and international art and culture magazine like OurCulture, Frieze, etc.

Exhibition Awards:

Curator's Award:

Invitation to participate in an exhibition hosted by SPIRA9 at Unlock Art Collective Space in 2025.

Sponsorship for participation in SPIRA9's solo exhibition (planned for December 2025).

A permanent personal page on the SPIRA9 official website.

Feature articles or interviews in the SPIRA9 column.

Audience Choice Award:

Certificate of Excellence issued by SPIRA9 Gallery.

Invitation to participate in an exhibition hosted by SPIRA9 at Unlock Art Collective Space in 2025.

Feature articles or interviews in the SPIRA9 column.

All Participating Artists:

Certificate of participation.

Exhibition documentation and promotion on the official website and social media channels.

Interested artists should send their submission materials by August 27. Selected artists will be notified by email.

Everything     Fades  to    Begin

Everything        Lost  is   Found

Everything        Else  is      Here

Everything    Cycles to       End

Everything         Old  is       New

Everything      Then  is       Now

SPIRA9