East London-based arts organisation Bow Arts will unveil its first central London project space this autumn, with an action-packed programme on Shaftesbury Avenue for London’s Frieze Week. Collaborating with ‘non-fair’ Minor Attractions as on offsite event, participating artists include Rosie Gibbens, Tim Spooner and the 2023 East London Art Prize winner Kat Anderson.

Programming for the takeover will include evenings of immersive performances, led by boundary-pushing performance artist Rosie Gibbens; mechanised sculptural works taking over Shaftesbury’s ex-office space, featuring Gibbens and Spooner; and the site-responsive exhibition Take A Seat, featuring over 40 artist made chairs that mischievously merge the aesthetics of form and functionality, inviting audiences to both play and sit down. Bow’s 2023 East London Art Prize winner Kat Anderson will also be showing her newly commissioned and celebrated film Las, Fiya (Last, Fire), together with new paperworks made from the byproducts of sugarcane.

Programming for the takeover will include evenings of immersive performances, led by boundary-pushing performance artist Rosie Gibbens; mechanised sculptural works taking over Shaftesbury’s ex-office space, featuring Gibbens and Spooner; and the site-responsive playful exhibition Take A Seat, featuring over 40 artist made chairs that mischievously merge the aesthetics of form and functionality, inviting audiences to both play and sit down. Bow’s 2023 East London Art Prize winner Kat Anderson will also be showing her newly commissioned and celebrated film Las, Fiya (Last, Fire), together with new paperworks made from the byproducts of sugarcane.

Bow Arts’ new meanwhile building is 125 Shaftesbury Avenue, over 50,000 square foot of ex-office space moments from Tottenham Court Road Station. Following the likes of 180 Studios at 180 The Strand, the new space will enable Bow’s talented community of artists and programmers the freedom and space to deliver something truly spectacular. Known for its boundary-pushing exhibitions and events, usually based at the Nunnery Gallery and HQ in Bow, for the first time the charity will go west, inviting audiences to a programme not to be missed on this year’s Frieze Week circuit.

Take A Seat is a collaboration between Bow Arts and curatorial duo ha.lf, (Haydn Albrow and Flora Bradwell). Several of the participating artists have created their sculptural chairs at Shaftesbury as part of a residency, responding to the building by both assimilating and rejecting the desolate office environment. Each day the artists’ chairs will be set out in a grid formation with visitors invited to reconfigure the show by pulling up a chair and taking a seat.

The exhibition of mechanised sculptures will feature work from Gibbens’ Parabiosis series and Spooner’s A New Kind of Animal. Parabiosis unpacks the pregnant body with sculptures that combine ‘puppets’ and machinery. The title refers to the surgical technique of joining two living organisms together to share a physiological system. Spooner’s animal forms will be tangled and tethered by electrical cables, trapped under bits of remaining furniture, vibrating on empty lockers, and showing off in conference rooms. Originally made for Southwark Park and Bluecoat’s gallery spaces, this new iteration of A New Kind of Animal will be reborn to relate and inhabit the office spaces at Shaftesbury, alongside Gibbens’ various ‘birthing’ contraptions which can become activated in performance.