Everything Then is Now - Alter Peckham

With Everything Then is Now – Alter Peckham, SPIRA9 launches its nomadic series Othering by staging a week-long curatorial intervention in one of South London’s most elusive architectural spaces. The Old Waiting Room at Peckham Rye Station, a Victorian relic sealed for over half a century, was famously reanimated in 2023 through Sarah Sze’s Metronome. Here, SPIRA9 takes the baton, not to restore or occupy the space, but to inhabit its liminality: the space between what was and what is yet to come. Peckham, where histories, geographies, and identities converge, is the ideal site for an exhibition exploring the cyclical, shifting nature of belonging. Over seven days, interdisciplinary artists respond to thresholds of form, discipline, and identity through site-specific works that dissolve temporal boundaries. The space becomes a mutable realm of “otherness.” The project’s title signals its conceptual underpinning: that the past is not fixed but constantly re-emerging in the present, and that “Othering,” so often framed as exclusion, can instead be a generative act. Here, difference becomes a site of connection and hybridization, resisting closure in favour of coexisting narratives. In this formulation, the “Other” is not feared but embraced as an agent of transformation. What emerges is less an exhibition than a collective experiment in spatial imagination. The Old Waiting Room, its grandeur weathered, its walls inscribed with dormant histories, becomes a living canvas. Works pulse against the room’s Victorian bones, their material and performative gestures refracting the space’s suspended temporality. Visitors navigate an environment in which memory, corporeality, and self are not stable entities but interwoven forces. "Everything Then is Now" carries a meta-architectural weight. As the Old Waiting Room nears its transformation into a permanent cultural venue, SPIRA9’s activation acts as both prelude and provocation. In collaboration with London Design Festival and public institutions, the curators assert art’s role in shaping how we re-enter and reimagine historic spaces. The exhibition’s final line lands not as a slogan but as a curatorial ethos, looping time, identity, and memory. Everything Fades to Begin, Everything Lost is Found, Everything Else is Here; Everything Cycles to End, Everything Old is New, Everything Then is Now. Invited Artists: 1e-43 (Lei Zhang) | Angelo Bartolome | Ariel Li & Peifeng Cai | Asia Nowicki | Bailey The Illustrator | Canbin Liu | Chaoming Zheng | Daria Koshkina | DI CAO | Doğan Özdemir | Elizaveta Berkutova | Eman Khalifa | Eva Alliner | Hanyu Wang | Jie Huang | Junying Jiang | Jundai Lin | Lexiong Ying | Lisa Marty | Louis Loveless | Mandy Lane | Manlin Zhang | Maksim Frolov | Martin Darbyshire | Mathijs Hunfeld | Meng Li | Min Sui | Niah McGiff | Nuo Yang | Peiyan Zou | Po-Chien Huang | Qianru Yang | Renate Lurdesa Baumane | Ruohong Chen | Sheena Bulpitt | Shuting Cui (Juice) | Siyuan Meng | Tingyan Luo | Tianyu Zhang | Tonghe Yang | Xin Zhang | Xingyi Qu | Xinyun Li | Xinyu Yan | Xinyue Liang | Yalu Zhao | Yang Liu | Yifan Jing | Yi Ming Zhang | Yiyi Song | Yixin Wang | Yudan Ding (Yuna) | Yujie Liu | Yuwan Zhang Opening Night: 16 September | 18:00 – 21:00 General Admissions: 17-21 September | 12:00 – 19:00 Opening Night Performance: · Until Nothing Remains Visual & Performance: Performance Director/Choreographer/Dancer: James Shing Mu Cheng | Choreographer/Dancer: Siqi Chen Sound: Live Electronics: Juice | Cellist: Santi Lowe · A Song of the Blues – Eva Allinder Performers: Aisling Gallagher | Niamh Gallagher | Lucy Havelock | Ao Shen. Special Performance: · Balcony Whispers – Siyuan Meng Curator: Kaycee | Creative Director: Teng Xue | Curatorial Assistant: Jingqi Chen | Exhibition Designer: Daniel Foster | Technical Producer: James O’Connor | Photographer: Yilu Tang, Han Wang SPIRA9