Five contemporary art exhibitions and installations will open across Exeter city centre from 5 to 14 June 2026, turning libraries, passages, galleries and university spaces into part of a citywide programme. The REWORLDING projects, organised by University of Exeter MA Curation students, will run daily from 11 am to 4 pm.
People searching for Exeter events now have a date, a route and a reason to go. The displays are spread across sites including Exeter Library, the Underground Passages, the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, Unit 5 in the Guildhall Shopping Centre and Positive Light Projects on Sidwell Street, with each exhibition built around work by international artists.
The strongest clue to the programme’s scale is how widely it is being staged. Parish Maps: Then, Now, Next, curated by Rebecca Wood, will be shown at Exeter Library. ENDURANCE, curated by Niga Salam, will take place at the Institute of Arab & Islamic Studies. Ways of (Machine) Seeing, curated by Leixinyun Huang and Yifan Yang, will occupy the former Body Shop in Exeter’s Guildhall Shopping Centre. When the Earth Holds Us Quietly, curated by Indie Hansford, Thea Perignon and Laila Ross, will be at the Underground Passages. Phantom Threads, curated by Kaia Brushaber, Liv Pattimore and Moyan Zhang, will be at Positive Light Projects.
Wood’s exhibition brings together archival maps from the original Parish Maps project with newly commissioned and collaboratively produced works, giving the city’s own spaces a direct role in the display. Phantom Threads uses textiles to show the role of labour, care, gender and memory in craft, while also giving what is often treated as underappreciated women’s work more visibility. Free workshops and events on knitting, mending and textile-based making will run alongside it, pulling the project beyond the gallery wall.
That push matters because the exhibitions are framed as graduation projects even as they set out to respond to social, ecological and technological crises. ENDURANCE includes film, photography, sound, installation and performance by eight Kurdish artists, and looks at everyday resilience in the face of ongoing conflict in the region. Ways of (Machine) Seeing brings together Xu Bing and Ye Funa to explore how digital culture has entered everyone’s lives, while When the Earth Holds Us Quietly draws on sculpture, textile, audio and film made from natural, foraged and found materials by artists who have listened to the land and collaborated with it.
The result is a student-led programme with public reach, and its main unanswered question is not when it opens but how each site will change the work shown inside it. For 10 days in June, Exeter will get a city-centre exhibition trail that links repair, memory and new ways of seeing to the places people already move through every day.
