Nick Murray: Return to Dreamphone – Exhibition and Unconference at ACAVA Barham Park Studios, Wembley (March 2025)

Nick Murray: Return to Dreamphone

Return to Dreamphone (26-30 March) is a new exhibition by Nick Murray, concluding their six-month artist residency at ACAVA’s Barham Park Studios. In a room-sized installation with a card table, shaped like Barham Park’s nearest floodplain, Murray explores how collective imagining can impact the politics of public space.

The exhibition is an in-progress document of Nick’s ongoing project to map the shifting landscape along the River Brent. This chapter follows the Wembley Brook as it passes underneath Barham Park and meets the Brent at Stonebridge Park. The river becomes an allegorical path – it meanders, obscuring the search for a utopia that can be glimpsed, but remains just out of reach.

Return to Dreamphone asks what a community archive can offer; reliant on communal responsibility and immediate care. Anyone can access it, add to it, and take from it. Each participant becomes the caretaker and custodian of a growing archive and living manifesto within this library of communal utopian dreaming. How might a community-held server exist within Barham Park? A filing cabinet, a bird box, or a park bench? Perhaps a depository for the found stones or fallen leaves – what and who would it hold space for? How could it speak to the values of the park’s constituents? Would the server actually serve? Who would contribute to it, and how long would its legacy last?

Nick Murray is a working-class artist, producer and composer who makes interactive sonic and narrative work focusing on loss and digital cultures. Their work often takes the form of games, interactive poetry and performance.

ACAVA Hosts is an annual opportunity for a London-based artist from a Global Majority background who considers social engagement as integral to their studio practice. The residency and exhibition are generously supported by Arts Council England, through ACAVA’s National Portfolio Organisation (NPO) funding.

Georgia Taylor Aguilar, Curator of Professional Development at ACAVA, said:

“It has been a pleasure and privilege to have worked with Nick during their six-month residency with ACAVA. Their imaginative practice is rooted in playful participation and responding so thoughtfully to the hyperlocal contexts. This imaginative and empathetic work is very special, a talented artist with much to offer on how we reflect and rethink our collective space.”

Nick Murray will be facilitating Unconference: We All Go Together, a day-long workshop event to complement the exhibition, inspired by the unconference format, including Jo Summers’ Underdeveloped and Mattie Brice’s Lost Levels and Valentina Karga’s Gigantic Jelly Blob.

Unconference: We All Go Together

Saturday 29 March, 11am – 4pm
Free, sign up here
Refreshments provided

Unconference: We All Go Together is a relaxed, day-long workshop event to share experience and grow our communal knowledge. Facilitated by Nick Murray, there is no set programme structure, and everyone who attends is invited to speak or run a discussion if they wish. Sessions are 20 minutes, and you can run a session on whatever you want. Present a question to delve into, share a project, play a game, lead a walk. It’s intentionally informal and low tech. This is a space to share on an equal footing and to open up new conversations.

Ends.

Listing information

Nick Murray: Return to Dreamphone
26 – 30 March 2025
ACAVA Barham Park Studios, 660 Harrow Road, Wembley, HA0 2HB
Free, no booking required

Unconference: We All Go Together
29 March 2025
ACAVA Barham Park Studios, 660 Harrow Road, Wembley, HA0 2HB
Sign up here

About ACAVA

We are a leading arts education charity that evolved from artist-led initiatives in the early 1970s. For 50 years, we have been amongst the UK’s most progressive affordable studio and workspace providers.

With a portfolio of 20 studio buildings, exhibition spaces and workshops across nine London boroughs, three locations in Essex and an industrial heritage site in Stoke-on-Trent, we support a community of over 400 creative practitioners and cultural organisations.

A pioneer of delivering arts in health and wellbeing settings, we bring professional artists together with local communities in programmes to explore their creativity with transformational outcomes.

ACAVA stands for the Association for Cultural Advancement through Visual Art. Created as a statement of radical intent by the artist founders to use culture for social good, it remains the ethos of our organisation today. www.acava.org / @ACAVAarts

About Nick Murray

Nick Murray is a working-class artist, producer and composer making interactive sonic and narrative work focusing on loss and digital cultures. This often takes the form of games, interactive poetry and performance. Nick has spent the last seven years developing a body of work that questions the nature of memory and grief in the light of a rapidly hyperconnected world and the looming threat of climate collapse, creating playful environments that reframe and recontextualise well-known contemporary cultural symbols.

They are the lead producer of Now Play This, the experimental game design and playful arts festival, and London’s foremost incubator for game arts. They are the Director of Playing Poetry, an organisation that champions playful and interactive literature through exhibitions, workshops and participatory events.

In 2023, Nick was selected as part of Film London’s Lodestars cohort, celebrating innovative film and game-makers across the capital. Their work has been exhibited internationally, including Festival ECRU (Brazil), National Poetry Library (England), Edwin Morgan Trust (Scotland), AMAZE (Berlin).

Artist’s website.