Awakening started from a refusal rather than a theme. Working with a derelict two-storey space in Peckham rather than a conventional gallery, the project asked what a group show looks like when it isn't shaped by a white cube's usual grammar.

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Across visual art, moving image, sound and live performance, the participating artists were given a loose thematic anchor — awakening, consciousness, transformation — and then left largely alone to work out how their pieces would sit next to one another. Some conversations between works were curated deliberately; others were left to happen, or not happen, on the night.

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There is a version of "awakening" that contemporary art returns to often, usually softened into wellness language — light overcoming darkness, colour blooming from muted tone. This exhibition was less interested in that resolution than in the mess before it: the show ran for one night only, with a live music programme running alongside the visual and moving-image work, and no attempt to extend its life beyond that single evening. It was built to be attended.

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That doesn't mean the work was unconsidered. The catalogue, the artist selection and the sequencing of the evening were all produced with the same attention any exhibition requires — the difference was in what that attention was used for. The aim was to hold space for distinct practices and to trust a raw venue to do some of that work on its own.

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Awakening doesn't resolve into an argument about what awakening means. It offers, instead, a night where that question was left open in front of an audience.