My Body is Dust

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, Peckham.

EXHIBITION DETAILS

My Body is Dust – Asylum Chapel

Exhibition Dates: 06/02/2026 – 10/02/2026

Location: Asylum Chapel, Peckham, London

First-round Submission Deadline*: 7 January 2026, 23:59 (BST)
*Please note: We strongly encourage early submissions, as space is limited and proposals are reviewed on a rolling basis. Due to the high volume of applications received, we are unable to provide individual feedback. Only selected artists will be contacted directly via email.

EXHIBITION OVERVIEW

My Body is Dust – Asylum Chapel unfolds within a former church in Peckham, reimagining the chapel as a body — a convergence of multiple lives rather than a singular existence. The structure of the space functions like the circulation of organs, with light and echo as its blood, and artworks operating like the nerves of thought and desire.

Inspired by new materialism and generative philosophy, the exhibition explores the simultaneity of decay and regeneration: decay is not an end, but another form of becoming. Each work is a temporary body, a being in formation. They transform through decay, dissipate through regeneration, revealing the fluidity of life and the agency of matter.

Dust becomes a shared life force — carrying memory, absorbing energy, circulating between body and space. As everything continues to decay, deform, and regenerate, we traverse the expelled garden once more, reconsidering “life” as a structure of cycles and symbiosis.

We are seeking artists whose practice engages with these themes:

Creators working with organic materials (plants, metal oxidation, fungi, soil, scent, etc.);

Artists in virtual and AI-driven practices, including generative imagery, sound, algorithmic art, and virtual life;

Practices investigating the relationship between body, space, and time — approaching, receding, decaying, regenerating;

Works exploring energy and material transformation, e.g., through light, sound, electrical signals, temperature, evaporation;

Artists reflecting on memory, disappearance, archives, relics, or data decay;

Social-ecological and environmental philosophy-focused practices, including symbiosis, degradation, circular economy, or aesthetic ecology.

All media are welcome - video, sound, installation, performance, generative art, text, AR/VR, AI works, or interdisciplinary research.

We are interested in how works “breathe”: how they approach, recede, decay, and continue to grow in dissipation. Please tell us how your work “generates life.”

About Asylum Chapel

Experience the unusual. Crumbling paintwork, stunning stained-glass windows, and ethereal dancing shadows define Asylum Chapel, a Grade II listed venue steeped in London history. Established around 1827 as Caroline Gardens Chapel, it was part of London’s largest almshouse complex, originally serving retired pub landlords.

The chapel became the community’s heart, celebrated for its bright, choral services and memorials to benefactors such as HRH the Duke of Sussex and HRH the Prince Consort. Surviving wartime bombing with remarkable resilience, its stained-glass windows and funerary monuments remain today. Following decades of dereliction, the space was revitalized from 2010 onwards for art projects, exhibitions, and cultural events.

OTHERING SERIES

My Body is Dust is the second chapter in SPIRA9’s nomadic exhibition series Othering, following Everything Then is Now – Alter Peckham, which transformed The Old Waiting Room at Peckham Rye Station into a site-specific stage exploring cyclical temporality, memory, and belonging.

My Body is Dust continues this exploration, inhabiting the liminal space between decay and regeneration, body and architecture, memory and becoming.