SPIRA9 Presents: 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, a cultural node where histories, geographies, and identities converge, becomes the ideal locus for an exhibition concerned with the cyclical and ever-shifting nature of belonging. The curators invite artists, architects, designers, performers, and interdisciplinary makers to respond to thresholds—of form, discipline, and identity—through site-specific works that dissolve temporal boundaries. Over seven days, the space transforms into a mutable realm of “otherness,” where audiences are encouraged to step outside habitual frameworks and inhabit fluid states of perception.

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 also holds a meta-architectural significance. As the Old Waiting Room approaches redevelopment into a permanent cultural venue, SPIRA9’s activation reads as both a prelude and a provocation. By collaborating with London Design Festival, Southwark Council, and public institutions, the curators stake a claim for art’s role in mediating how we re-enter and reimagine historical spaces.

The exhibition’s final line—“Everything Fades to Begin, Everything Lost is Found, Everything Else is Here; Everything Cycles to End, Everything Old is New, Everything Then is Now”—lands less as a slogan than as a curatorial ethos. It encapsulates the show’s recursive movement through time, identity, and spatial memory, offering not closure but a loop of continual becoming.

SPIRA9’s debut in Peckham is a quietly radical proposition: that by dwelling in the in-between, we might find a more expansive understanding of place, self, and one another.

Artists:

1e-43 (Lei Zhang) | Bailey the Illustrator | Blandine Martin | Canbin Liu | Chaoming Zheng | Daria Koshkina | DI CAO | Dogan Ozdemir | Elizaveta Berkutova | Eman Khalifa | Jie Huang | Junying Jiang | Lexiong Ying | Manlin Zhang | Mathijs Hunfeld | Meng Li | Min Sui | Peiyan Zou | Qianru Yang | Ruohong Chen | Tianyu Zhang | Tingyan Luo | Tonghe Yang | Xinyue Liang | Xin Zhang | Xingyi Qu | Yifan Jing | Yi Ming Wang | Yiyi Song | Yudan Ding (Yuna) | Yalu Zhao | Yujie Liu | Yuwan Zhang | Yang Liu

Opening Night📅 Tuesday 16 September🕕 18:00 – 21:00Join us for the launch of SPIRA9’s week-long nomadic exhibition, with artist introductions, live interventions, and a first look at site-specific works.

Public Viewing Hours

• Wednesday 17 September – Monday 22 September12:00 – 19:00 daily

Special Programmes (details to be announced)

• Guided tours with curators & artists
• Live performances & activations
• Panel discussion: Liminal Spaces in Contemporary Practice