‘Act 0 – Where the Artist Ends and the Artwork Begins’: A new experimental exhibition exploring authorship, intimacy and the conditions of art-making will debut this May as part of Brighton Festival 2026.
This spring marks a new chapter in Brighton’s contemporary art landscape as The Adelaide Salon, in collaboration with Brighton Festival, presents Act 0, inaugurating the Founders Room at Brighton Dome as a dedicated gallery space.
Act 0 introduces the Founders Room as a site for artistic experimentation, foregrounding process-led, relational and interdisciplinary practices at the heart of the city’s evolving visual arts programme.
By opening its spaces to contemporary visual art, Brighton Dome & Brighton Festival reinforces its role not only as a leading performance venue but also as a platform for exhibition-making, critical discourse and cross-disciplinary collaboration — during the festival and beyond.
The exhibition continues The Adelaide Salon’s commitment to supporting contemporary artists while fostering new forms of cultural exchange in Brighton, including its upcoming Art Gala with the Royal Pavilion later in May.
We are incredibly excited to see Brighton Dome & Festival open its doors to visual art in this way. The creation of the Founders Room as an experimental gallery marks a meaningful shift—not only for the institution, but for the city. It signals a commitment to artists, to process, and to the kind of work that needs space to unfold.”
Paulina Anzorge & Pascal Dowers, The Adelaide Salon Founders
This collaboration animates our public spaces at Brighton Dome for both audiences and artists. Brighton Festival is a time when we welcome local, national and international creatives, and I am thrilled that The Adelaide Salon and Act 0form part of that ambition, alongside a city-wide visual arts programme.”
Lucy Davies, CEO, Brighton Dome & Brighton Festival
Act 0: Where Does the Artist Exist?
At its core, Act 0 poses a fundamental question: where does the artist end and the artwork begin?
Focusing on the threshold between life and form, the exhibition considers whether the artist can be located within the work itself—and how much of lived experience remains once it is translated into material.
Each piece is presented as both trace and declaration, where thinking, living and making converge.
Bringing together two artist duos—Isobel Smith and The Baron Gilvan, and Lucy Newman and Bob Dixon—the exhibition explores artistic practice as relational, shaped through proximity, shared environments and exchange. Authorship here is not fixed, but entangled, negotiated and lived.
Across painting, drawing and performance-led practices, the works move between inner and outer worlds. Gestures, materials and recurring motifs function as fragments—partial disclosures of thought and experience that remain suggestive rather than complete.
Brighton Festival 2026: A Renewed Focus on Artists and Place
The launch of the Founders Room signals a subtle but significant shift in Brighton’s cultural landscape.
Under the leadership of CEO Lucy Davies, Brighton Festival 2026 places renewed emphasis on artist-led programming, site-specific work and meaningful engagement with place—balancing international perspectives with the depth of creative practice rooted in Brighton and the surrounding region.
By expanding into visual art and experimentation, Brighton Dome & Festival broadens its role beyond performance, positioning itself as a dynamic hub for exhibition-making, dialogue and interdisciplinary exchange.
Each year, Brighton Festival transforms the city into a vibrant platform for performance, music, visual art and ideas.
Featured Artists
Isobel Smith
Working across performance and material practice, Smith explores the dissolution of boundaries between self and environment. Using everyday objects and natural materials, her work inhabits hybrid states that blur distinctions between the human and non-human.
The Baron Gilvan
Gilvan’s paintings and drawings unfold like fragments of a visual opera, moving between absurdity and reverie. His work stages psychological states—collapse, devotion, grief and reinvention—where ruin becomes a site of transformation.
Lucy Newman
Newman works with everyday artefacts alongside historical and geological references. Through illusion, primary colour and material transformation, her practice interrogates perception while maintaining a sensitivity to surface and presence.
Bob Dixon
Rooted in dérive and durational observation, Dixon’s work examines the relationship between seeing and knowing. His drawings function as visual diaries, while paintings and prints emerge from symbolic inner worlds shaped by alchemy, ecology and ritual.
Act 0 is at the Founders Room Gallery, Brighton Dome, Brighton during May 2026, as part of Brighton Festival. The exhibition is open to Brighton Dome Concert Hall ticket holders prior to scheduled performances.
Find more information on The Adelaide Salon here.
And information on Brighton Festival here.
