…I will be here and there — inside and outside — between walls and beneath the trees… present and absent, boundless and forbidden… foolish and resolute, formless and bodiless… I will be among you like a ghost that has lived 1000 years, yet was born only yesterday…
Ghost Art School X Independents Biennial presented a constellation of exhibitions and events under the banner of ‘The Right Map’, for the Independents Biennial held in Liverpool during 5 June to 14 September 2025. The exhibitions consisted of, Unstable Series - Holes I - IV — an ever-changing exhibition existing in various iterations, curated by Rory Macbeth, at The Stables Gallery Spaces, and Slipstream, centred on process and collaboration, curated by Phoebe Thomas, at CBS Gallery, Liverpool.
Emerging from the spirit of Ghost Art School, it celebrates artists who move between margins, who learn in the cracks, and who map their own routes when none are given. Here, the map is never fixed. It is drawn in gestures, erased by time, and redrawn in conversations, defiance and in care. ‘The Right Map’ asks, not where we are going, but how we move - and who and what gets to move us.
The Right Map: Unstable Series - Holes I - IV, curated by Rory Macbeth. The Stables Gallery.
Holes are strange. We talk about them as things, but they are ‘not-things’ — defined by what surrounds them, not what they are. They exist and don’t exist at the same time. The works here are holes literally or metaphorically. Holes as places to hide, or to hide things. Holes are portals - a way in to a different world, access to the inaccessible. A view through to the other side. Dummy phones invite you to talk to people you cannot reach by ordinary phone — to talk to the mythical, the fictional, to the deceased, or the unborn. Cakes which, as people cut and ate at the opening, revealed ‘Skye-Picot 1916’ on the plates, the name of the treaty dividing up the Middle East engineered by Britain and France and that has been the foundation of all the destabilisation and war right up to the present day. The audience re-enact this act of division, and create a hole way bigger than an empty plate.
Cartoon holes on glass hover uneasily and precariously in reality, referencing possibilities of holes from Alice to wormholes via Looney Tunes and the Yellow Submarine.’MacArthur Park’ is sung in a shower, a song about loss as an overheard unseen private moment. The hayloft resonates with the dissonances that come from broken organ pipes - holes that have unplanned-for holes. Poles that serve as a way of viewing other things, has its eyeholes placed towards the floor or up high, and away from the viewer, rendering their instinct to look through them, in an act of a truancy of vision. From stalactites, found holes, filling holes, objects that make holes, silhouette cut-outs of an eskimo’s brain that adorn holes — from Ursula K Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction to black holes and back again.
Ghost Art School’s logo are two eyeholes — actual holes, that can be put in anything. It is a means of looking through to something else - reversing the panopticon. Ghost Art School members have been collecting images of found holes that make up an ongoing and perpetually growing collection, adding to the strangeness of holes — Holes hold positions in our lives. Their position is not measured by a title or name, but by location and the responsibility they carry. What we learned, and the kinds of holes we found in a map that was already full of them and searching for further holes, the experience went far beyond what was expressed - more about what happens when we work together, recognising where we succeeded so that we can carry them forward, and where things did not work so we can avoid them.
Participating artists:
Alison Reid, Alma Stritt, Charli Kleeman, Chelsea Johnson, Chris Roberts, Colm Moore, Conner Browne, Cos Ahmet, Danielle Freakley, David W Hicks, Eleanor Capstick, Finn Roberts, Gary Finnegan, Gwendolin Kircali, Halyna Maystrenko-Grant, Hannah Browne, Harriet Morley, Igor Prato Luna, Jasmir Creed, Karema Munassar, Lily Patricija, Mai Sanchez, Marie-Sofie Braune, Molly Lindsay, Molly Mousdell, Phoebe Thomas, Priya Foster, Ritu Arya, Rory Macbeth, Sonic Relics, Theodora Koumbouzis, Tom Doubtfire, Tom Kelly, Valetina Passerini, Xueying Zhang
Images: Cos Ahmet, Installation and detail views of A Truancy of Vision I (diptych), 2025, and A Truancy of Vision II, 2025, from The Right Map: Unstable Series - Holes I, curated by Rory Macbeth, The Stables Gallery Spaces, Port Sunlight Village, Wirral.
The Right Map: SLIPSTREAM, curated by Phoebe Thomas. CBS Gallery, Liverpool.
SLIPSTREAM centres on process and collaboration. The act of creation is a fluid and mutable as water. SLIPSTREAM asks our artists to wade in the rivulets of another's practice. It asks them to trust, and to reach their hands underneath the surface, to trawl for memories, moments, and acts of making. What rises to the surface easily - and what stays lodges in the silt?
Travelling in the wake of a fluid form; taken adrift by an external force. The spaces behind, in-between, following, following, following another path. SLIPSTREAM follows a simple score: The participating artists were each asked to define their practice in 30 words or less, breaking it down into its constituent parts before handing this over, and anonymously assigned another’s definition of their practice. This ‘new’ practice would now become wholly or part of each artist’s own practice — the aim, to push each artist outside of their comfort zone and encourage experimentation, resulting in a response through exchange and approach. How would each artist interpret this? These exchanges were brought together in a group exhibition, further developed in the gallery setting. The identities were revealed to each of the artist after the experiment came to an end.
Participating artists: Cos Ahmet / Gary Finnegan / Halyna Maystrenko-Grant / Jasmir Creed / Karema Munassar
Delivered as an in-between sculpture, Cos Ahmet responds to the physicality and temporality of painting. A singular happening - a brushstroke loops in and out of the frame. 'In The Act of (Not) Painting (To Look At Things Slowly)' addresses Ahmet's given prompt, where he chooses to view this one element as an action or performance, and in this case, the act of ‘not’ painting as his riposte.
Reduced to a slowed down gesture, the work expropriates the flow of painting, removing the visible attributes of the application of paint to a surface. The empty stretchers propped on two stacks of books mimic a painting’s momentary limbo that is somewhere between coming fresh out of the studio and moments of install that a gallery setting brings. The reference books point to the act of making and hint at the history of art - hidden within the pages of its books, all at once highlighting the unseen endeavours that lurk behind the closed doors of an artists’ studio - the overall appearance presented as if a thesis on the undoing of a process.
Images: Installation views, stills and short excerpt from The Act of (Not) Painting (To Look At Things Slowly), 2025 by Cos Ahmet, part of The Right Map: Slipstream, curated by Phoebe Thomas, CBS Gallery, Liverpool.