Where We Are: Place, Presence and Belonging

Where We Are is not one fixed exhibition. It operates as a feedback loop imagery: image >> encounter >> response >> new image

Set at The Vault on Brighton’s eastern seafront, the project asks how people see, occupy and remember a place, and how identity, experience and context determine what each of us notices. Seeing belongs to everyone, but no two people see the same place in quite the same way.

Movement One: 1–15 October
Socially Engaged Photography: Gil Mualem-Doron

Drawing on his experiences of migration and queer identity, alongside a PhD in architecture, Gil Mualem-Doron works with people whose lives cross geographical, cultural and social boundaries.

Participants help shape how they appear, what they reveal and how their stories are told. Through projects exploring displacement, Palestinian memory, coastal pollution and queer communities in São Paulo and Cape Town, Gil asks who is permitted to be visible, and how photography can create space for agency, dignity and resistance.

His work has been shown nationally and internationally, including at Tate Modern, Turner Contemporary, the Jewish Museum Vienna, Umm el-Fahm Art Gallery, P21 Gallery and the Lionel Wendt Art Gallery in Colombo.

Movement Two: 15–30 October
A Live and collaborative Exhibition Event: Led by Kathy Williams

Kathy Williams begins with photographs contributed by artists, residents and local businesses. The installation then changes through conversation, observation and public image-making.

After more than 23 years of taking photographs, Kathy will also create new work in response to The Vault, the seafront and the social life developing around the project.

Visitors can explore Shadows of Image, contribute to a seeing wall of photographs made from the same viewpoint, create tracings or develop ideas through open, facilitated spaces. Basic printing and image-making facilities support experimentation with composition, process and presentation.

Participation does not replace artistic rigour; it becomes part of it. Each response changes what somebody else may notice next, allowing authorship to move between artist, participant, image and place.

AFTER LIFE: Closing Party · 31 October

What we see matters and shapes what comes next.