This summer, John Hansard Gallery presents a compelling exploration of artistic responses to our rapidly evolving global landscape.
New World Order brings together diverse voices from across the UK and around the world, fostering solidarity in increasingly divisive times through the unique perspectives of artists with varied lived experiences.
In an era characterised by geopolitical instability and shifting power dynamics, artists offer vital alternative perspectives on conflict and division. Through examinations of botany, community building, historical reflection, land rights, and domestic spaces, these exhibitions invite us to reimagine our relationship with the world around us.
Mykola Ridnyi: Mazepa’s Ride
Ukrainian artist Mykola Ridnyi premieres his ambitious Mazepa trilogy, developed in collaboration with John Hansard Gallery since 2022. This culminating exhibition unveils two new artworks that extend Ridnyi’s exploration of Ivan Mazepa’s contested legacy – a political and military leader of the Zaporozhian Sich and Left-bank Ukraine in the late-17th and early-18th century, whose story has been mythologised throughout European art and literature.
The trilogy began with The Battle Over Mazepa (2023), which reimagined the historic literary clash between English poet Lord Byron (1788–1824) and Russian poet Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837) as a contemporary rap battle. Now reaching its powerful conclusion with two new works: Mazepa’s Ride (2025), a surreal musical fantasy examining gender transformation through non-binary BDSM performers; and Poltava (2025), a multi-channel video installation investigating how the 1709 Battle of Poltava continues to shape Ukrainian identity.
Created against the backdrop of Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, Ridnyi’s Mazepa trilogy interrogates historical narratives, cultural appropriation, and Ukraine’s continuing struggle for self-determination. Following its Southampton premiere this summer, Mazepa’s Ride will travel to the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw as part of the Kyiv Biennial 2025–26.
Exhibition supported by The Foundation Foundation, Kyiv Biennial, and the Ribbon Foundation. Read more
Morgan Quaintance: Available Light
Morgan Quaintance presents Available Light (2025), a major new film developed through an innovative research partnership with cultural sociologist Dr. Laura Harris, Anniversary Fellow at University of Southampton. Shot while visiting Japan, this immersive work explores notions of home and belonging through interviews with workers at the Edo Tokyo Open Air Architecture Museum, juxtaposed with conversations featuring renters in both Tokyo and London.
Utilising Quaintance’s signature sound design and 16mm film techniques, Available Light creates a dreamlike dialogue between the museum’s preserved historical ideals of domesticity and the precarity of temporary accommodation in urban Japan, as seen by an outsider.
The exhibition also features two companion pieces produced during Quaintance’s Tokyo research: Seeikokan III (2025), an ink animation utilising leftover Tokyo footage, and Walking Distance (2025), which pairs imagery of Mount Fuji with subtitled reflections on distance and perspective. This expanded presentation is part of a year-long touring project featuring new formal elements and contributions from various artistic collaborators, including Dr Laura Harris’ essay When Buildings Move (2025). Read more
Alaa Abu Asad, Jumana Manna, Kin Structures
In his video-essay Wild Plants of Palestine (2018), Alaa Abu Asad follows botanical expeditions led by Birzeit University professors documenting Palestinian flora in the West Bank. The work interrogates the territorial dimensions of what constitutes ‘Palestinian’ in a postcolonial landscape, while addressing photography’s dual role as both a tool for knowledge dissemination and information control.
Abu Asad also presents his ongoing research project, The dog that chased its tail to bite it off (2019–present), which examines Reynoutria japonica (commonly known as Japanese knotweed) as a metaphor for exploring xenophobia, migration, and cultural acceptance. The project traces how this plant – expropriated by Dutch East India Company physician Philipp Franz von Siebold and first brought to Europe in 1823 – transformed from prized botanical specimen to vilified ‘invasive species.’ Abu Asad draws compelling parallels between the aggressive rhetoric used to describe this plant and similar language directed at human migrants, questioning why certain non-native species become national treasures while others remain perpetually foreign despite their remarkable resilience.
Jumana Manna‘s meditative film Foragers (2022) blends fiction, documentary, and archival footage to examine the impact of Israeli nature protection laws on Palestinian foraging traditions. Shot in the Golan Heights, the Galilee, and Jerusalem, the film captures traditional knowledge of wild edible plants alongside community resistance against prohibitive legislation that criminalises the collection of native plants like ‘akkoub and za’atar. Through this lens, Manna questions who determines which traditions survive and which face extinction.
Artists Kin Structures (Kwame Lowe and Arman Nouri) present …rooting (2025), showcasing their ongoing work to create infrastructure for cultural and community expression. Beginning in response to the erasure of community spaces in London, Kin Structures’ art/infrastructure practice reveals the conditions of contemporary urban governance and builds alternative infrastructures rooted in the lived experiences of marginalised communities.
In recent years, much of this work has been put to the service of the Soanes Centre, a pioneering children’s environmental education centre in Tower Hamlets, east London, that Kin Structures have been working to protect alongside long-term stewards Setpoint London East.
Through four week-long residencies, Kin Structures will transform John Hansard Gallery into an evolving space for community engagement and organisational reflection. …rooting explores intentional presence, witnessing and learning through collaborative activities with Southampton-based artists, educators, and community groups. During Kin Structures’ absence, the space will function as an installation displaying traces of their process. This project marks the beginning of a three-year collaboration with John Hansard Gallery’s Guest Curator Jack Ky Tan, exploring artistic practice within organisational development frameworks.