Soft Focus - February’s Art Detour

Post-Grad Community Ambassador Elif Cim presents Soft Focus, a student led walk that encourages slow looking and informal discussion in and around public galleries.

In a city like London, where movement often feels compulsory, there is something quietly restorative about deciding to slow down. February’s Soft Focus gathering began in the residential streets around Victoria Park, in that stretch of East London where cultural spaces sit almost discreetly between houses and corner shops. The idea was simple: two moving image exhibitions, connected by a walk. An art detour that treated the journey between venues as part of the work itself.

We began at Chisenhale Gallery with Arash Nassiri’s A Bug’s Life. The gallery was saturated in blue light, casting a cool stillness across the room. On screen, a wooden puppet wandered through an opulent Beverly Hills mansion built in the 1980s by Iranian émigrés, one of the last examples of a distinctive architectural micro movement that emerged after the 1979 Revolution.

The house was lavish but curiously airless. Marble floors, sweeping staircases, ornamental excess. Yet through the puppet’s small, searching presence, the space felt less triumphant than exposed. Questions of taste and aspiration surfaced gently. Who decides what beauty is? What does grandeur conceal? The puppet’s vulnerability unsettled the house’s authority. Watching it,
there was a sense of moving through spaces that promise belonging but deliver isolation instead.

That feeling resonated. Many of us are navigating postgraduate study, inhabiting institutions that can feel impressive and estranging in equal measure. The conversations that followed did not feel forced. Loneliness came up, as it often does when given enough air. So did the desire for something softer than competition. For community that is not merely professional but sustaining.

The walk to Auto Italia offered space for those thoughts to stretch out. Crossing the park at a shared pace altered the rhythm of the afternoon. London felt momentarily less compressed. Talking side by side rather than face to face has its own intimacy. The exhibition was still with us, but so were an opportunity to share our own stories.

At Auto Italia, Rob Crosse presented a contrasting vision of habitation. His moving image work centres on residents in one of Europe’s first and largest multigenerational TLGBQIA+ housing projects, established in 2023. Here, home was not spectacle but practice. We encountered accounts of queer marginalisation, chosen family, shared rituals and a non binary couple raising their first child.

If Nassiri’s mansion explored aspiration and displacement, Crosse’s work focused on the patient labour of building community. The atmosphere was tender, attentive to care as a daily act rather than an abstract ideal. The scale was human. Kitchens, conversations, intergenerational exchange. A social ecosystem sustained not by wealth but by intention.

Across both exhibitions, habitation emerged as something relational. We shape spaces and are shaped by them in return. Soft Focus created a temporary structure of its own: a few hours held together by shared attention and the willingness to move slowly through the city.

In March, we will gather again. If you are curious about looking more closely, walking more gently and spending time with art and conversation in equal measure, we would love you to join the next Soft Focus detour.

The next Soft Focus event will take place on 21 March from  12.30pm to 2.30pm, you can book your space below.

Book your space for the next Soft Focus event!

Post-Grad Stories

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Do you have a story you want to share? You can email us at pgcommunity@arts.ac.uk.