Collectives Hub: Inner Room
Love Rules
Love Rules is a group exhibition bringing together four women whose multidisciplinary practices explore intimate relationships from the woman's perspective, visualising the ways affairs, faith, love, loss and religion shape intimacy. Combining photography, collage, moving image, text and voice, the exhibition holds space for the complexity women carry inside relationships: complicity, longing, guilt and loyalty. The artists use distinct formal languages that converge on shared psychological territory.
In response to Future Histories our works function as declarations rooted in a gendered experience across various life stages. Images and words become a record of what it means to love as a woman today. We explore how much the body and mind carry, how deeply these experiences change us, and how much we continue to be influenced by them, despite forces – both personal and political – that continue to shape us.
Prints are shown at varying scales in an intimate setting: some framed, some not, protected or untethered as memory is. A four-channel audio installation plays the voices of all four artists through four speakers: each speaker representing one woman recounting their personal statement, as their voices overlap, encouraging visitors to come close and experience our narratives. The voices, like memory, blur into one another.
Inner Room is a collective of four women - Alexandra Vacaroiu, Lauren Joy Kennett, Mika Sperling and Vasudhaa Narayanan - whose work is rooted in autobiography and the intimate terrain of personal relationships. Working across various mediums, each of us draws from our own experiences of love, loss and the complexities of what we carry within us.
We come from different countries and different lived experiences that have shaped our life choices. Yet we are all driven by the same necessity: to be witnessed in the way we love. Through our work, we return to the difficult moments within our most intimate relationships to understand what transpired, and in the process, find our way back to ourselves by altering those experiences through our artistic practice, into something that no longer controls us.
Collectively, our work has been exhibited across venues including Rencontres d’Arles; Foam Amsterdam; Deichtorhallen Hamburg and Photoworks; and in exhibitions across Europe, the United States, and India. Mika Sperling was awarded the Louis Roederer Discovery Award at Rencontres d’Arles in 2022. Lauren Joy Kennett is supported by Arts Council England. Vasudhaa Narayanan’s work was recently presented at Photo London 2026. Alexandra Vacaroiu has been longlisted for the Women In Art Prize.
Artists
Inner Room
We are four women who have lived inside these rules.
We have broken them and been broken by them. We have carried them in our bodies and our minds years after the relationship changed or ended or found its way back to something true.
This work is about love. Complicated, consuming, painful and sometimes the only thing that holds you together.
Alexandra Vacaroiu
Alexandra Vacaroiu – [No one reads bedtime stories to mothers anymore] (2026) explores the body as a site of memory, intimacy and return. Through fragmented self-portraiture, moving image and spoken text, I trace the physical and emotional residue of motherhood, marriage, desire, separation and solitude. The work moves through wanting and refusing, being touched and withdrawing, holding and letting go, asking what remains in the body after intimacy has passed. Domestic gestures and traces: hair, bedsheets, pillows, skin, become evidence of relationships and selves inhabited. At its centre is a
Lauren Joy Kennett
Lauren Joy Kennett – Mistakes and Bad Decisions (2019–ongoing) is an exploration of my experiences navigating undiagnosed autism in the context of intimacy and power. It started as a way to make sense of the toxic relationships I stayed in before I understood myself, before I knew that I struggled to make boundaries or communicate my needs or even process what I wanted. Before I knew I was autistic.
The work captures the scars left by relationships where consent felt like compliance, where desire became obligation, where I lost myself trying to fit into expectations I didn't fully understand.
Mika Sperling
Mika Sperling – Red and Blue (2024–present) “When we first met his hair was blue and mine was red”
In her ongoing body of work Red and Blue Mika Sperling guides us through the intense emotional landscape of a long-term romantic relationship following a breach of trust. 'Within the rituals and fragments of everyday life I find metaphors that allow me to believe in healing from the trauma my betrayal caused us both. Drawing from archival images spanning eighteen years with my partner I turn toward reflection —using his body and eyes as a mirror through which to confront and understand my own
Vasudhaa Narayanan
Will The Flowers Grow Through the Asphalt? (2024-ongoing) traces a love challenged by caste, language and religion in contemporary India. Our relationship unfolds within a matrix of inherited differences where love becomes both possibility and provocation. We were both born in the early nineties—at the cusp of a nation’s transformation, as the right-wing Hindutva project began to unravel itself. Our union began as that power reached its zenith. We are children of this ideological shift, formed in its crucible.
‘Through photography, personal texts, and handwritten letters, I trace how our di
Opening times
Friday 2 October 2026 Sunday 22 November 2026
| Monday | Closed |
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| Tuesday | Closed |
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Photo Fringe Collectives Hub 2026 Private View
Fri 2 Oct, 6–9pm, Free (unticketed)
Phoenix Art Space, Brighton
Photo Fringe Launch After-Party
Fri 2 Oct, 9–11pm (£5 +booking fee)
The Rose Hill Tavern, BN1 4JL
LOVE RULES - Live Reading
Sat 3 Oct, 2-3pm, Free (unticketed)
Phoenix Art Space, Brighton
