A Site-Responsive Nomadic Exhibition by SPIRA9 06/02/2026 – 10/02/2026 | Asylum Chapel, Peckham, London

SPIRA9 invites artists, architects, designers, performers, and interdisciplinary makers to submit proposals for My Body is Dust – Asylum Chapel, a site-responsive exhibition unfolding within the atmospheric and historically charged Asylum Chapel in Peckham, South London.

With its crumbling paintwork, luminous stained-glass windows, and lingering echoes of past lives, Asylum Chapel becomes a living organism—a body of memory, reverberation, and temporal transformation. Across five days, artists are invited to inhabit this unique architectural relic through works that engage decay, regeneration, and the agency of matter.

Exhibition Details

My Body is Dust – Asylum Chapel

Exhibition Dates: 06/02/2026 – 10/02/2026
Location: Asylum Chapel, Peckham, London

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

Submission Deadline

First-round Submission Deadline: 7 January 2026, 23:59 (BST)
Final Submission Deadline: 21 January 2026, 23:59 (BST)

Please note: We strongly encourage early submissions. Space is limited, and proposals are reviewed on a rolling basis. Applicants will be informed of their results on CuratorSpace within two weeks after the submission deadline.

Exhibition Overview

My Body is Dust – Asylum Chapel unfolds within a former church in Peckham, reimagining the chapel as a body—an accumulation of many lives rather than a singular existence.
Light becomes circulation, echo becomes breath, and artworks operate as the nervous systems of thought, memory, and desire.

Drawing from new materialism and generative philosophy, the exhibition explores the simultaneity of decay and regeneration. Here, decay is not an ending—it is another form of becoming. Each work is understood as a temporary body: forming, dissolving, shifting, and re-emerging. In this environment, dust becomes a shared life force—carrying memory, absorbing energy, and circulating between body and space.

As every structure continues to erode, deform, and regenerate, we return to the expelled garden once more, questioning “life” not as linear progression but as a system of cycles, porousness, and symbiosis.

Themes & What We’re Looking For:

We invite artists whose practice engages with decay, transformation, material agency, and the shifting thresholds between body, space, and time. We welcome proposals in any medium, including installation, video, sound, performance, generative systems, text-based work, AR/VR, AI, and interdisciplinary research.

We particularly encourage submissions from creators exploring:

• Material & Organic Processes
  Works using organic elements: plant matter, oxidation, fungi, soil, scent, water, ash, light-sensitive materials
  Practices exploring decomposition, fermentation, chemical change, or entropy
  
  
• Virtual, Digital & AI-Based Practices
  Generative image/sound/VR
  Algorithmic structures
  Digital or virtual “life forms”
  Data decay, corrupted archives, digital fossils
  
  
• Body–Space–Time Relations
  Works that approach, recede, erode, regenerate
  Performances exploring bodily presence, fragility, ritual, disappearance
  Practices concerned with permeability, transience, or embodiment
• Energy & Transformation
  Light, shadow, temperature, vapor, resonance
  Sound as a spatial organism
  Electrical currents, magnetic fields, or kinetic systems
• Memory, Disappearance & Remains
  Archives, ruins, relics
  Traces of lived experience
  Material fragments, memorial practices, speculative archaeology
• Ecological & Philosophical Approaches
  Symbiosis and mutualistic structures
  Ecological degradation and renewal
  Circular processes and material ethics
  Aesthetic ecology, environmental philosophy

We are interested in works that breathe—art that continues to grow, dissipate, or transform within the space.

Please tell us how your work “generates life.”

About Asylum Chapel

Established around 1827 as the Caroline Gardens Chapel, Asylum Chapel is a Grade II listed architectural relic and one of London’s most atmospheric cultural sites.

Originally the spiritual heart of London’s largest almshouse complex, the chapel served retired pub landlords and was renowned for its bright choral services and memorials to benefactors including HRH the Duke of Sussex and HRH the Prince Consort.

The building survived bombing during World War II, its stained-glass windows and funerary monuments enduring through destruction and abandonment. After decades of dereliction, the chapel was revived from 2010 onward as a site for artistic and cultural intervention.

Today, its crumbling walls, diffused light, and ethereal shadows offer a rare environment for artworks rooted in transformation, memory, disappearance, and becoming.

Othering Series

My Body is Dust is the second chapter of SPIRA9’s nomadic exhibition series Othering.

Following the inaugural project Everything Then is Now – Alter Peckham, which reactivated The Old Waiting Room at Peckham Rye Station through explorations of cyclical temporality and belonging, this next chapter inhabits the threshold between decay and regeneration.

My Body is Dust continues the series’ investigation into how we occupy the in-between:
between body and architecture, between memory and matter, between disappearance and re-emergence.

Key Benefits for Selected Artists

• Exhibition in a Historic, Atmospheric Venue
  Selected artworks will be presented within the haunting architectural body of Asylum Chapel—a Grade II listed former church renowned for its crumbling patina, stained-glass windows, and ethereal light. The chapel has become one of London’s most iconic sites for contemporary art, offering a powerful environment for works engaging transformation, materiality, and embodied space.
• Professional Visibility
  Gain exposure through SPIRA9’s curated nomadic series Othering, attracting audiences from contemporary art, design, architecture, and interdisciplinary research.
• Official Invitation Letters
  Receive an official invitation letter issued by SPIRA9 (with support from partner institutions), suitable for visas, residencies, and professional development applications.
• Artist Awards
  SPIRA9 will present the Curator’s Choice, Critics’ Choice, and Audience Choice awards during the exhibition.
• Press & Media Features
  Selected works may be highlighted through UK and international media outreach, with potential inclusion in critical reviews and cultural publications.
• Curatorial & Technical Support
  Artists will receive dedicated curatorial guidance and installation support to ensure strong conceptual and spatial presentation of their work.
• Sales & Collector Network Access
  A curated sales catalogue will be produced. SPIRA9 will connect artists with collectors and provide guidance on pricing and market positioning.
• Permanent Digital Presence
  Exhibited works will be archived on the SPIRA9 website and promoted across social media and publications.
• Ongoing Relationship & Opportunities
  Selected artists may be considered for future SPIRA9 projects, collaborations, and professional development support.