Viewing Rhythm in the Blues

This mental health week, Rhythm in the Blues reminds us of the healing power of art.

This pop-up exhibition arrives on Percy Street for a short, sharp run this May, co-presented by Octavia Art Gallery founder Pamela Bryan and London-based curator and art advisor Julia Campbell Carter. Bringing together international contemporary artists Alia Ali, Aigana Gali, Azadeh Ghotbi, Naomie Kremer and Lucille Lewin, the show draws a line between New Orleans and London, two cities where music, migration and layered histories have shaped cultural life.

Taking Rhythm and Blues as a point of departure rather than a soundtrack, the show thinks about rhythm as inheritance and feeling. Across photography, textiles, painting and porcelain, these five artists work through questions of memory, place, diaspora and belonging, turning repetition, tonal shifts and intuition into a shared visual pulse.

Ali’s textile-framed photographic works bring material traditions and embodied language into focus; Gali’s luminous abstractions look to Tengrism and the mythic landscapes of the Eurasian Steppe; Ghotbi’s gestural canvases ask us to pause and look beneath the surface. Kremer’s abstract oils, meanwhile create shifting, almost musical fields of association, while Lewin’s fractured porcelain works turn breakage, reassembly and tension into forms that are delicate and defiant. Together, they make a persuasive case for art as a language that can carry sound, history and feeling at once. Catch it while it’s on.