To dig for fossils in the soft blue sea

To dig for fossils in the soft blue sea is curated by The Pending Collective, the young people's collective at BACKLIT Gallery.

Through multimedia artworks, Pending's showcase explores censorship, creative resilience, and how rebellion is remembered or erased in archives.

• Fowler is a multidisciplinary artist working across film, installation, text and scavenged objects.
• Dasha Kurbatova reimagines folk stories and mythologies through an ecofeminist lens.
• Joanna Spyrou uses photography, video, costume, and performance to explore how lesbian identities are seen and unseen in Cypriot culture.

Together, their practices surface personal, political and cultural histories connected to Cyprus, Russia and South Africa, offering fresh ways to resurface stories, and how to document them anew.

• Preview event (booking through Eventbrite required): Friday 13 March 2026, 18:00–20:00
• Exhibition (no booking required): Saturday 14 March 2026, 12:00–16:00
• Location: Main Gallery, Second Floor, Alfred House, NG3 1JG

Fowler is a British-South African multidisciplinary artist working across film, installation, text and the things in between. Scavenged objects are found and reframed as temporary repositories for examinations of social critique. These examinations are informed by interviews, infiltrations and archives. Travelling from evangelical spectacles to quiet mealsshared in close company, these works draw from ideas of parallax to navigate a disjunctive experience: the alienated criticism of institutions and the personal attachments to the very individuals who uphold them.

Dasha Kurbatova is an artist whose main concern is storytelling. She uses folk stories, history and mythology to weave together her own narratives and communicate them through multimedia pieces. Kurbatova views these narratives through an ecofeminist lens, considering how femininity and the female body have been represented and mischaracterised throughout history. She reframes this perception within her own work, often using mediums traditionally seen as feminine.

Joanna Spyrou is a Cypriot-British artist who looks at how lesbian identities exist within Cypriot culture, utilising a variety of mediums, including photography, video, costume, and performance to produce seemingly lighthearted work; work that often hides serious issues. The work frequently relies on audience participation, whether that be attending a pseudo-wedding, or by ripping down lesbian manifesto posters, the audience members play an imperative role in pushing the work to where the artist wants it to go; to a conversation.

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