Twenty years ago, Bold Tendencies took over the derelict top four floors of Peckham Multi-Storey Car Park, first built in 1980 by Sainsbury’s Supermarkets. Since then, the not-for-profit arts organisation has become integral to south London’s art scene, making visionary work accessible to local communities. Its rooftop has seen free-to-visit art by the likes of Jenny Holzer and Nan Goldin become temporarily enmeshed in the Peckham skyline. And then there’s Frank’s Cafe, a pioneering rooftop bar and restaurant which opened in 2009 when rooftop bars were hardly a thing. Now, of course, it’s a beloved neighbourhood fixture, known for its affordable cocktails and tapas-style menu that’s perfect for balmy summer evenings.
Two decades on, Bold Tendencies has unveiled its 2026 season of art and performance, which includes a visual programme of five sculptures brought together under the theme of “euphoria”. The anniversary exhibition brings work by London natives Emma Hart, Athen Kardashian and Nina Mhach Durban into conversation with international artists Andreas Gursky, Tarek Lakhrissi and Louis Morlæ. The title of the exhibition may initially bring to mind the distinct, if often hollow, imagery of the HBO show. But this programme’s interpretation is anything but trite: euphoria is explored as a state of intensity, a prompt for political resistance. It looks like a crowded bar, a self-driving rover, a dancing mass at a nightclub.
The experience begins, as all Bold Tendencies visits do, by ascending the venue’s now Instagram-famous bubblegum pink staircase: artist Simon Whybray’s 2016 installation, conceived as a love letter, titled hi boo i love you which became the site of countless selfies when “viral” art installations were in their infancy.
The idea of the “love letter”, a contained confession of joy, dominates the programme. Kitsch, heart-shaped locks decorate I have often walked down this street before, Athen Kardashian and Nina Mhach Durban’s take on the high street shopfront. Visitors are invited to choose their own padlocks and post love letters through the sculpture’s letterbox in exchange for a donation to Pecan, a Peckham-based community development charity.
Andreas Gursky is the latest awardee of Bold Tendencies’s annual billboard commission, and his must-see piece is a love letter in its own right. Cocoon II, initially made in 2008 is a chromogenic print depicting a crowd of ravers in the East Frankfurt nightclub from which the work takes its name. Towering above the skyline, its vastness threatens to pull exhibitiongoers into the frenzy – it’s the largest display of Cocoon II to date.
In contrast, Tarek Lakhrissi’s Emergent Strategy depicts euphoria as a contained state, in a glimmering butterfly chrysalis emerging out of a steel corpus. Then there’s Louis Morlæ’s Euphoria Rover; an autonomous, self-driving robot with its own F1-style pit stop. Milling around the car park, Morlæ’s first public sculpture commission is equal parts Wall-E and Roomba, with an uncanny Cheshire Cat smile.
But the work that might get closest to the heart of Bold Tendencies is Last Chance Saloon, Emma Hart’s sculptural take on the pub as a “social machine”, she tells Broadsheet. Formed from clay, it’s a collection of bold-coloured sculptures representing faces, glasses and waving hands. She explains that she’s exploring euphoria as “collective rather than individual … interested in the point where excitement tips into overload”.
The piece is, in part, inspired by Hart’s south London upbringing. “I think I absorbed a certain visual directness from it. The humour. The improvisation. The lack of preciousness. Betting shops next to nail bars next to modernist housing. Hand painted signs. DIY modifications. Loud colours. Public banter. Noise. A kind of raw social energy.”
Euphoria runs at Bold Tendencies from May 15–September 12.
