The exhibition brings together, for the first time, over 100 rare objects dating back 3,000 years to recount the rich 100-year history of the Oriental Ceramic Society. On show will be ceramics, bronzes, jades, sculptures and works of art from some of the most outstanding collections in the UK, including the V&A, British Museum and from private individuals.

Open Daily (except Sunday & Monday): 11am – 5pm 

FREE – but pre-booking is recommended 

Immersive, interactive and participatory sound installation exploring the neuroscience of body image, self-worth and identity.

Understanding body image based on how we feel about the way we think we look, an embodied perception of our physicality; a journey through an spatial representation of our processing and formation of negative body image and the coexistence of biased views, that even though we are aware they are biased, we experience them as reality. A journey where the audience will be finding out for themselves as they progress through the installation in an experiential way.

Fri 15 – Sat 24 Oct (closed Sun), 12 noon – 6pm

FREE – Just turn up

It’s often said that 95% of known animal species are smaller than your thumb, but have you noticed how most museums fill their displays with big animals?

The Micrarium at the Grant Museum of Zoology is a beautiful back-lit cave of 2,300 microscope slides giving a glimpse of the vast diversity of animal life, nearly all of which is minute.

Opening days/times:
Tues – Fri, 1pm – 5pm
Sat, 11am – 5pm
Closed Sunday

FREE – just turn up

Windows of the Soul is a grassroots art exhibition, conveying the visual experience of those living with sight loss. As a holistic appeal to our senses, the diverse content ranges from paintings to sound recordings to tactile Braille art and has been developed through collaboration with people living with a variety of eye conditions.  The exhibition also hosts dialogue between some of the founding artists and offers resources to learn more about the eye conditions portrayed.

Windows of the Soul is supported by the University College London Public Engagement Office, the National Institute for Health Research Biomedical Research Centre and Moorfields Eye Hospital.

Opening hours: 12pm-6pm
Closed: Sunday 17 October

FREE – Just turn up

Images by Lindsey Whitelaw

This outdoor garden exhibition of Chila Kumari Singh Burman’s neon light sculptures opens with on the first evening of the festival at our live Cromer Street event Lights, Banners, Tigers and then continues through the week. Each evening the lights will be switched on to display a selection of Chila’s neon sculptures in the early evening. These lightworks include a Tiger, the national symbol of Bangladesh, and Ice-Cream Van, referencing Chila’s own roots as a South Asian artist growing up in Liverpool.

The sculptures will be illuminated from 6.30pm-8.30pm, daily.

FREE – Just turn up

The New Man is a Process: Socialist Poster Art in Mozambique represents the first UK exhibition of the vibrant graphic posters produced by the Mozambican Directorate of Press and Propaganda during the early years of independence. The works bear witness to the early socialist commitment of Frelimo – Mozambique’s ruling party from independence (1975) to date.

Open Daily (except Sunday & Monday): 11am – 5pm 

FREE – but pre-booking is recommended 

This year’s Bloomsbury Festival Art Competition is a joint award for Fine Art students Azeri Aghayeva Bagheri and Noorain Inam. They will present an exhibition of new and existing works responding to the 2021 Festival theme, Shining Light.

Azeri is a final year BA Fine Art student at the Slade, UCL. Her practice is fascinated by the objects which play a role within our lives as silent witnesses, absorbing life into their inanimate selves. She creates an arena in her paintings in which this monotonous relationship between people and objects are inverted momentarily, inhabiting an awkward space between the unbelievable surreal and the believable mundane. Shadows have eyes, limbs become ornaments, the carpet has fallen in love with the other, the moon melancholically overlooks a vacant cityscape. Normality and the laws of perspective are reinvented using a camera lens in which she captures her subjects first and then fictionalizes them in a painting.

Noorain completed her first degree at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture in Karachi, Pakistan where she pursued her interests in traditional Indo-Persian miniature painting and in complex compositions. She is now pursuing a Masters in Fine Art at Slade, UCL. This has allowed her – for the first time – to go for night walks by herself. Moments of solitude and observation led Noorain to a shift within her recent body of work towards simpler relationships that focus on the relationship between two people in a moment of stillness. She is inspired by the moonlit sky and nocturnal urban landscape which she aims to mirror in the luminosity of the figures.

Opening times: 12pm-6pm, daily

FREE – just turn up

A Bloomsbury Festival production supported by The Bedford Estates.

From serenity to ecstasy, contentment to awe, happiness encompasses many different positive feelings. What it means to be happy has preoccupied thinkers throughout history, and each of us has our own ways of feeling good.

On Happiness is a season of free events, activities and two exhibitions – Joy and Tranquillity – which celebrate the complexity of positive emotions and invite you to explore the big questions. What links our emotional and physical health? How have people, today and in the past, tried to experience happiness? Who gets to define what makes a ‘happy life’ and why? And in difficult times can joy help us navigate adversity?

At Wellcome Collection and online, enjoy multi-sensory artworks and historic artefacts, and see how cultural, scientific and spiritual perspectives on happiness compare with your own point of view. On Happiness offers an opportunity to rethink and reclaim happiness for our world today.

FREE at www.welcomecollection.org

Nick Andrew has explored the theme of city green spaces from the perspective of a rural landscape painter. He has captured the present-day life of the garden squares in this leafy, atmospheric neighbourhood, visiting regularly from Wiltshire, researching and drawing outdoors in a different public garden each time. What he saw happening as he painted, he recorded in a sidebar blog, shining a light on how the squares are used. The sketches are displayed in an open air gallery mounted on the railings of the various Bloomsbury Squares. Nick Andrew will also be sketching outdoors during the festival (more details to follow).

Sketches displayed in:
Bedford Square, WC1B 5BL
Brunswick Square Gardens, WC1N
Gordon Square
Marchmont Community Garden
Red Lion Square
Russell Square
St George’s Gardens, WC1N 2NU
Tavistock Square

FREE – Just Turn Up

An interactive film map of the Bloomsbury area, created using short films created by members of the public.

About the map

To make the map, we are asking participants to send their short films or movie snapshots, which ‘shine a light’ on a person, a place, a community, an activity or an object, located in the Bloomsbury area. The chosen films will be added to an interactive map of Bloomsbury, pinned to specific locations dotted around the area stretching between High Holborn and Euston Road, and between Tottenham Court Road and Southampton Row.

Gesturing towards the early films made by Lumière cameramen at the end of the 19^th century, each film on the map should be no longer than 50 seconds – a time sufficient to tell a story, record a sense of place or capture a unique moment.

The map will be launched during the Bloomsbury Festival 2021 and will be freely available on Google Earth platform. It is curated by the Derek Jarman Lab and Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image.

Call to participants

Look around you, pick up your camera or smartphone, and send us your contribution to a mosaic of moving image works that together will form a multi-perspective portrait of Bloomsbury, its people, buildings, streets, and communities.

You don’t need to be a professional filmmaker – we are looking for authentic, original, creative films that ‘shine a light’ on any aspect of Bloomsbury life. Your film can be serious or light-hearted, complex or simple, a one-off improvisation or a carefully crafted mini-classic!

Submission guidelines

The chosen films must observe the following editorial and legal guidelines:

1. Films can be shot on any camera, including smartphones, and edited with any software.
2. They should be submitted as .mov or .mp4
3. No more than 50 seconds in length.
4. If you add music to your film, use only tracks that are distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) and credit their authors.
5. Films cannot advertise businesses or services.
6. You need to be over 18 to participate in the project.
7. Submit your entry here: https://blog.jarmanlab.org/?page_id=336#page-content
8. The deadline for submissions is 13:00 Friday 8 October 2021.
9. By submitting your film, you confirm that your contribution is your own original work, is not defamatory and does not infringe any third party’s legal rights. You also confirm that you have the express consent of anyone who made a significant contribution to your film: those that the camera is following or that speak to camera, or whose words are caught on camera.
10. By taking part in the project, you agree that we will distribute your work as part of the Notes from Bloomsbury: 50 seconds later project in all media and without time restriction.
11. Copyright in your contribution will remain with you and this permission is not exclusive, so you can continue to use the film in any way including allowing others to use it.
12. Please indicate how you would like to be credited in relation to the film you submitted.

This exhibition will tell the stories of migration from Bangladesh to Camden, through a unique collection of photos and archives from the community, gathered and presented by the young people of Bloomsbury and Kings Cross.

Presented by Bloomsbury Festival in partnership with Kings Cross Brunswick Neighbourhood Association and Holborn Community Association. Curated by the community.

This outdoor exhibition is open all day.

FREE – just turn up

A new exhibition of 27 treasures, curios and artefacts from the Swedenborg collection.

Including items by William Blake, Josephine Butler, S T Coleridge, Queen Ulrika Eleanora, R W Emerson, John Flaxman, J V Hultkrantz, Helen Keller, T E Lawrence, Philip de Loutherbourg, Preston Powers, D T Suzuki, Charles Singer, Emanuel Swedenborg, Vernon Watkins and J J G Wilkinson. Curated by Stephen McNeilly.

Open daily throughout the festival from 11am – 6pm.

FREE – just turn up

Discover the extraordinary life story of eighteenth-century boy, George King, through his own words! From being left in the care of the Foundling Hospital to serving at the Battle of Trafalgar.

The Foundling Museum, Bloomsbury, are sharing the incredibly rare autobiography of Foundling Hospital pupil George King (1787 – 1857), in an exhibition that brings King’s voice to life, carefully curated by Professor Helen Berry, author of Orphans of Empire. The memoir includes King’s never-before-seen first-hand account of 21 October 1805 – at the Battle of Trafalgar …

“At eight o’clock we piped the breakfast… The most part eat their dinner for breakfast and each man was served with half a pint of wine… At half past nine Nelson made the signal that England expects every man will his duty.”

By exploring the realities of foundling apprenticeships and the impact that their labour had on Britain’s transformation into a global super-power, Fighting Talk brings a new perspective to our understanding of Georgian society and the lives of its working-class citizens. While also delving into the origins of the Foundling Hospital as a patriotic endeavour, designed to provide boys for Britain’s military.

Open daily (except Monday) 10am – 5pm.

Tickets (admission includes collections and exhibitions): £10.50 (£8.25, under 21’s FREE)

Ram Shergill’s poignant photographs of Bloomsbury taken during the first of 2020 lockdowns are contrasted by the vibrant images of the community captured during previous Bloomsbury Festivals.

A specially commissioned outdoor exhibition by The Bedford Estates.

This outdoor exhibition is open all day on the railings of Bedford Square Garden throughout the festival.

FREE – Just turn up

A trained classical-singer and actor, a choir-conductor and a painter, Tamar has always sought innovative practices to merge musical performance with visual-arts. During London’s 2nd lockdown she discovered body-painting and enthusiastically embraced it to her toolkit. The pandemic restrictions were the prompt which drove Tamar to create a one-woman-show from her dorms room, all crafted and executed single-handedly using a smartphone-camera and an iPad. By painting on herself and transforming to various characters from operas, poems, and plays, she was able to tell a multi-layered story using colours, sounds and movement.

This artistic fusion platform is also used by Tamar to further explore her Ph.D topic, which looks into the Jewish-Orthodox ban on female singing. The connecting thread between the displayed artworks in this exhibition are her attempt to find alternative ways to express her voice. Through three different themed-recitals (which correspond with the displayed body-painting artworks) Tamar will explore stereotypes associated with the female voice, tell the story of silenced or historically neglected female characters, as well as try to challenge gender boundaries, and reclaim classical-music pieces that are traditionally performed by men.

Open daily Wed – Sat: 12 noon – 5pm

FREE – Just turn up

An opportunity for all to engage with some of Bloomsbury’s outstanding discoveries, creativity and places of learning. Browse the exhibits and learn from some of the leading Bloomsbury academics and creative talent, as we focus on light, in all its meanings over two days.

Enjoy interactive exhibitions, displays, and workshops in the beautiful, spacious and dramatic setting of the University of London’s Senate House.

Exhibitors include UCL science departments, Moorfields Eye Hospital, Central St Martin’s Design Students, SOAS Origami Society with activities including astronomy, physics, eye science, medical imaging, design, origami, museums object handling, silk painting, craft skills and family activities.

A programme of talks  as part of the Exhibition hub will be announced soon.

Opening times: 

Friday 22 October
School bookings until 3pm
Public Opening 3pm – 5pm

Saturday 23 October
10am – 11am family autism friendly hour
Family day 11am – 5pm

FREE – Just turn up