COME TOGETHER
[Peckham 24, 16 - 25 May 2025]
EXHIBITIONS
TALKS AND EVENTS
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What can a festival do? Who does it serve, and how? What happens when we gather together annually, both in joy and in rage? Questions such as these provided the starting point for thinking about this year’s theme: COME TOGETHER. For the festival’s 9th edition, our programme foregrounds projects that explore themes of community, collectivity, solidarity and connection. Alongside a diverse range of exhibitions, our public programme encourages gathering as a critical and creative act, fostering new spaces for expansive dialogue and constructive debate.
Within a time of profound global turbulence, festivals like Peckham 24 provide an opportunity for people to assemble together and reflect, and to process what’s happening. Change rarely materialises through the actions and interventions of one person alone, and through gathering, we create the conditions for conversations that can lead to tangible change. By contemplating events together, we can explore the true shape of things and mitigate some of the fear that can lead to hopelessness. The short-term duration of a festival invites a concentration of energies and perspectives that can both create agency and nurture solidarity. But temporary gatherings can have long-term resonance. In an era characterized by fast assumptions, superficial gestures and quick fixes, and set against a cultural backdrop of high-speed content creation, this year’s festival celebrates work that prioritises meaningful interaction, long-term engagement and collaborative co-production.
Many artists and projects participating in this year’s festival have employed photography as a collective act of healing and mutual support.
Some projects amplify stories and voices from communities under-represented in the contemporary cultural landscape by collapsing traditional binary dynamics of author and subject; others attempt to navigate global events in real time, calling on us to confront our own complicity in grave abuses of power. The festival also argues for the political value of pleasure and playfulness in a time of such darkness and systemic violence. A number of projects explore collective joy and hospitality as radical tools in the creation of agency, with food as a language of love that echoes across time.
In 2025, Peckham 24 invites audiences to come to the table, take a seat, listen, and be heard. By encouraging visitors to step beyond the position of observer or bystander, the festival aims to create real moments of connection and map strategies for meaningful solidarity. The works on show upend narratives of division and polarisation, demonstrating alternative pathways forged by creativity and cooperation. In the words of Nan Goldin, a fearless artist who has always held a mirror up to society and been one of the loudest voices in the promotion of peace and justice, ‘the more of us there are, the more of us there are.’
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Peckham 24
CO-FOUNDER AND ARTISTIC DIRECTOR
Vivienne Gamble
CURATORIAL TEAM 2025
Emma Bowkett
Iona Fergusson
Vera Zurbrugg
Vincent Hasselbach
Vivienne Gamble