First Thursdays is finally back with an exciting series of free events scheduled from 6 to 9 pm in East London. The walking route will be approximately one hour long.

The first stop will be at 10 Greatorex Street for an exhibition curated by Warbling Collective, exploring the tension between clarity and ambiguity, closeness and distance, in our overstimulated yet disconnected world. As initial impressions dissolve upon closer inspection, hidden complexities emerge, revealing the fragility of perception. The works of Kate Atkin, Rachael Causer, Juliet Dodson, Fiona Goss, Ben Grosse-Johannboecke, Yujin Jung, Ya Luo, Ellie MacGarry, Kalil Mitchell, Alison Poon, Georgia Salmond, Fred Sorrell, and Tava Tedesc invite us to navigate this space of uncertainty, where meaning feels both within reach and impossibly distant.

Later the route will head to NıCOLETTı for Navigator. Following Southgate-Smith’s solo presentation at Frieze London 2024 with NıCOLETTı, Navigator will be the first solo exhibition by the London-based, Togolese-British artist at the gallery. Spanning photographic collage, sculpture, moving-image, text, poetry, and 3D animation, Southgate-Smith’s practice examines conditions of oppression and empowerment by referencing and intersecting black, queer and female experiences. Central to Southgate-Smith’s approach is a meticulous focus on selecting, ordering, and assembling archival material. Comprising collages printed on diverse materials such as glass, gesso boards and tatami mats, Navigator invites us to consider archives as temporal instruments enabling the envisioning of a future deeply connected to the past. Throughout the exhibition, the artist evokes an Afro-diasporic counter-memory that blends personal, literary, folkloric, and historical narratives, conjuring layered, speculative spaces that (re)map histories beyond prescribed contexts.

The last stop is at Soft Opening for An Ominous Presence by Ebun Sodipo. The artist presents her largest works to-date, with a suite of new collages centred around an interpretation of the gothic that offers a re-framing of both social and art history. Traversing ideas of horror, the end of the world, death, fear, mystery, mythology, ghostliness and the unknown, these unsettling new works extend the artist’s exploration of the idea that the trans woman represents a threat of danger and destruction. Arranging images across a reflective metallic surface and encasing them in a thick layer of clear resin, Sodipo immortalises the figures, phrases and scenes that she assembles. While the glimmer and shine of her materials offers an allegory for the aesthetic expressions of transformation, Sodipo deliberately obscures self-reflection and stacks her images to complicate their clarity, their translucency enabling their contents to merge and generate new meanings. With every image carefully selected and positioned, the works in An Ominous Presence seek to reimagine the way we conceive of the past, time and history through images.